San Francisco -- Recent teardown analyses of Sony Corp.'s Playstation 3 and Nintendo Co.'s Wii lay bare the divergent battle plans for the latest phase of the videogame console wars. Days after conducting a teardown of the PS3, engineering consultancy Semiconductor Insights last week released the preliminary results of a Wii teardown that uncovered--predictably--a comparatively simple design with far fewer major components.

PS3 teardowns conducted in mid-November by Semiconductor Insights (Ottawa) and market research firm iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) revealed a complex design--including several large, complicated subassemblies--optimized for both power and performance. By contrast, Semiconductor Insights' Nov. 19 teardown of Wii found only half a dozen notable components and was concluded in minutes, according to engineers with the firm.

"There are a lot more, and a lot more-complex, chips on the PS3," said Don Scansen, lead process technology analyst at Semiconductor Insights. "[Sony] had to devote a lot to the power of those devices and to handling the heat created by those devices."

Retailing in the United States for $250, Wii sells for roughly half the price of the low-end PS3 (with a 20-Gbyte hard drive and a price tag of $499; the high-end, 60-Gbyte model retails for $599). Whereas Sony is courting hard-core gamers willing to pay top dollar for sophisticated high-definition graphics, Nintendo has built what it hopes is a more intuitive system designed to attract new and casual gamers.

After Wii's predecessor--GameCube, released in 2001--was trounced by the Playstation 2, "Nintendo needed to do something that was differentiated from [Microsoft Corp.'s] Xbox 360 and the PS3," said Colin Sebastian, a senior research analyst at Lazard Capital Markets LLC. "GameCube appeared to be a 'me too' console. With Wii, they've done something very different in an effort to broaden their market beyond the core, loyal Nintendo gamers."

Wii's most innovative feature is a novel controller, the Wii Remote, that uses motion-sensing technology to enable players to control the action of a game by waving it through the air--swinging it back and forth to control an on-screen tennis racket or baseball bat, for example. According to Gregory Quirk, technical marketing manager at Semiconductor Insights, the Wii Remote is "intuitive to use and surprisingly responsive." The firm's teardown of the controller revealed the source of that responsiveness: three-axis motion signal-processing technology, based on sensor components provided by Analog Devices Inc. and STMicroelectronics Inc.

As expected, the teardown revealed that the Wii console is powered by a 90-nanometer IBM processor, code-named Broadway and based on IBM's Power architecture, that was designed exclusively for Nintendo. The processor taps silicon-on-insulator technology to improve the processing power while reducing energy consumption by 20 percent, according to Semiconductor Insights. The PS3, by contrast, famously uses the more powerful IBM Cell, also built on a 90-nm process.