Telltale programmer claims iPhone is more powerful than Wii

While responding to complaints from Wii users who are upset over frame rate issues with the WiiWare version of Tales of Monkey Island, a Telltale Games programmer claimed that Apple's iPhone is more powerful than the Wii: 

The voices and textures are the way they are because we're limited to 40 megs for WiiWare titles. The PC versions of our games are usually 150+ megs, and most modern games range anywhere from 1-10 gigabytes or more. Talk to Nintendo about this one.

Frame rate issues will probably get sorted out eventually, but keep in mind that the Wii is just not a powerful console. An iPhone is much more powerful than a Wii, even.

As you'd expect, other users on the Telltale forums called him out on that statement, to which he responded:
And I stand by them. The Wii and DS are extremely underpowered and their popularity doesn't remove the hardware limitations. :)

...

When asked what specifically made the iPhone more powerful:

The extra RAM is really what makes the difference. Of the Wii's 88 MB of RAM, a not insignificant chunk of that is always being used by the OS and is unavailable to developers. The Wii's RAM is also split into two separate banks, each of which has different read/write metrics and you can't really spill from one to another if you need to.

As I said before, everything in computer science is about striking a balance between a small memory footprint, or having blistering fast algorithms. When you are limited in file size and memory footprint, you spend a lot of processing time decompressing things, deciding what needs to be loaded in memory at the moment, streaming things on/off the disk, and so on. If you have more memory, you can use cheaper (or no) compression, spend less time worrying about how much stuff can be loaded, hit the disk less frequently, memoize calculations, and other awesome stuff.

A little bit of RAM goes a huge way in letting you use faster algorithms. It's more important than a faster processor, IMO.

(Spotted on GamesIndustry.biz)