Submitted by: kirkland on Saturday September 09th, 2006 at 10:11 AM EST

IBM said Friday it had begun shipping the first processor chips to Nintendo intended for use in its next-generation "Wii" gaming console. The chip, code-named "Broadway," is said to offer a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption.

Big Blue's processors can now be found in every next-generation console. The Wii sports a processor based on the PowerPC architecture; Microsoft's Xbox 360 is a triple-core PowerPC processor running at 3.2GHz; and Sony's PlayStation 3 includes a cell processor that IBM co-developed with Sony and Toshiba.

The Wii is expected to ship around the same time as the PlayStation 3, and retail for under $250 USD. Its low price alone may put a serious dent into the sales of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, which retail for as much as two or three times the Wii's base price.

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