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Comment by danhor | Hacker News Reader

The DSi has four times the ram and the main processor is twice as fast as the DS.

The GB Color is also twice as fast and has more than double the RAM. (Although one can argue if it's an upgrade or a real "separate" console)

The New 3ds has been mentioned, which is more than 8 times faster and has double the ram.

The only handheld generation where Nintendo didn't do this was the GBA, so it's very common.

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Thanks for the list! I didn't knew about the 'New' 3DS.

Though, I would still argue a 4K upgrade is a little far fetched. Nintendo hardware has always been less powerful than that of its 'competitors', who only recently started pushing 4K. (whether or not Nintendo actually competes with Sony and Microsoft is a whole other discussion :P).

> The only handheld generation where Nintendo didn't do this was the GBA, so it's very common.

Since we're talking things that affect portability/battery life in general: The GBA SP, aside from being their first foldable handheld, was the first with an internal light and a built-in rechargeable battery (instead of taking AA or AAA batteries).

Nitpicky, but the New 3DS isnt more than 8 times faster than the Old 3DS: it has a quad core 800MHz processor instead of a dual core 268MHz processor. Even with perfectly scaled multi-threaded code, thats only a ~6x increase.

No idea how that happened, I guess I simply forget the dualcore cpu on the original model. But to one-up the nitpicky-ness one could argue that the "real" game performance still has a more than 8x increase, since both models seem to reserve one core for the OS.

To be fair, the Gameboy Color was sort of its' own generation separate from the GameBoy and the Mini

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