It just seems to me Nintendo designs the case before they order the components. Iwata wants it to be a size of two DVD cases or whatever it is this time.

I just cant imagine a reasonable powerful entry designed by AMD costing all that much more to manufacture when they are not pushing any boundaries at all. But when it needs to hit a certain TDP it is problem because Nintendo does not want to pay laptop level component prices

Better IQ should be self explatonary when comparing a PC game running even on DirectX overhead 4850 vs 360

I remember seeing a table somewhere in the Southern Islands thread (or was it Kepler's?) with component prices for each graphics card.
I can't find it right now but I think I remember noticing how the price difference between a Juniper and a Redwood was actually around $10.
Of course, that is without the pricier PCB, voltage regulation system and GDDR5 memory.

Which could mean anything... I'm just trying to nail down what GPU you're thinking of in order to make any sense of your wishes.

6670 is 3X the flops of Xenos and one would assume dirt cheap.

You can one at "retail" prices so that includes a PCB, cooler, and 1 GB of GDDR5 for around ~70 after rebate, I've seen the DDR3 versions of this board for about $50. The GPU's cost must be in the $10-20 range by now.

And even though it's only about 3X the flops, I would guess that you can squeeze out more performance out of it than Xenos since a relatively more modern architecture.

I think IGN unintentionally releaved it when they said x720 with 6670 is 20% more powerful

Looking at Redwood level power

The same article that said Wii U =5x 360 and 720 = 6x?
Yeah, go ahead and cherry-pick the part you want. :roll:

First off, this board is far too educated to presume that developing a console GPU is like shopping at Newegg. Or even determining current component prices, if it was AMD/ATI, Genyo Takeda (IR&D) would not have spent 2yrs.+ in the development process on the Wii U's graphics processor. I realize we are attempting to establish a power as well as an architectural baseline, but this will be an amalgamation of processor capabilities that will yield a very custom proprietary chip. Somewhat defying the current DX metric. (to a degree of course)

What I mean when I say that is this, we cannot assume because it's based off of, or similar to gpu architecture "X," that it is incapable of "Y." Y equaling effects such as tessellation, IBL, real-time GI, deferred rendering, etc. There are certain visual aspects, such as lighting, that are very important to Nintendo. I have heard that, much like the Flipper, Nintendo has incorporated at least partially a portion of the same design philosophies into the Wii U chipset. Features that “automagically” appear during shader code implementation. A post from my early days regarding the GC’s architecture on B3D:

"However, as mentioned above, a couple of features where added in automagically already, like self-shadowing and tinting for example."

"Per-object self-shadowing can be realized quite nicely on the Nintendo Gamecube. The benefit of doing self-shadowing on a per object basis is that one does not need to be concerned so much with precision."

"One should note that during the shader build many features are activated dynamically. For instance, if an object should get tinted a color multiplication is added to the final output color whatever shader was setup before."

"The results of global lighting can be computed in three different ways: per vertex, per pixel using emboss mapping, and per pixel using bump mapping. All three of these methods come in two variants one with self-shadowing and one without."--Florian Sauer & Sigmund Vik http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20.../sauer_pfv.htm

Also 8 light values came at a very negligible performance cost, because Flipper computed light values in parallel to UV generation. It’s these types of “hardwired” like effects Nintendo I believe has carried over to make modern shader effects with a subset of fixed feature functionality . I’m simply providing examples as I do not know to what extent overall it is, or can be incorporated. (esp. with the gpu being of a modern design) I was told that lighting behaved in this manner, & that lighting was a point of emphasis. As always with a secondhand source, you must always be cautious not to take it as gospel. (though I trust this source, Nintendo's NDAs are the most binding)

Nintendo did make certain alterations to their gpu based upon various 3rd party input, a first. Usually, they tend to develop their gpus & platforms with just simply ATI/Nintendo engineering, consultation, & guidance. Designed around their evolving software strengths, & "the natural flow of the industry."-Genyo Takeda Yes, I am referring to all those benchmark tests Nintendo ran on 3rd party engines for optimization on Wii U hardware.

But make no mistake, Nintendo's footprint is definitely here. You will see a marked performance difference in their proprietary engines, as well as close 3rd parties, & exclusive titles. (UbiSoft, Capcom, etc.) Also, ARM may also be providing their DSP component solution. The nameless devs that are claiming inferiority to the current generation of consoles are either inept, or working with middleware that is still yet unoptimized for the differing Wii U architecture.

Yeah, the developers have to be inept because Nintendo would never, ever, cheap out on hardware (GB/DS line). Ok, ok, but that is their handhelds, Nintendo would neeeever cheap out on their home console! (Wiiiiii!) Ahem. Ok, ok, but every indications is the WiiU is a performance MONSTER. A big, harry, performance breathing MONSTER. Oh, wait, general reports don't indicate such? Ok, developers are just inept. Glad we settled that!

Sarcasm aside, I don't think anything is off the table yet. Nintendo has been fairly secretive and they are still on dev kits with final hardware at retail at least 6 months away. But I don't think rose tinted glasses should take off the table the prospects that Nintendo, for whatever reasons, has gone with notably cheaper hardware. Not knowing their Form Factor and their Power requirements we should be careful. If they aim for something akin to the Wii there will indeed be some strict power limitations.

I'm by no means defending Nintendo's past handheld technical offerings Acert, or even the Wii. But from what I was able to glean from my sources, I just cannot fathom it. Also Acert, the GC was a nice piece of kit. :)

Nice certainly (I like the way GC games look), but possibly the weakest of the generation performance wise (bar the 1998 Dreamcast). And it went on to power the hugely successful Wii, which was outclassed by even the Xbox 1. If the WiiU did end up being around PS360 performance - or even weaker in some ways - it wouldn't be a surprise and it wouldn't necessarily be a mistake.

I've got a bit of a thing about the WiiU being a CPU+GPU+EDRAM SoC, and the performance level now being talked about might fit in a ~200 mm^2 ish chip which seems like a reasonable size for a mass produced chip judging by Llano, Trinity and the chip in the 360S.

IBM and AMD now have experience of combining PowerPC and ATI graphics on IBM's manufacturing tech, and IBM are the masters of on-chip edram. I think Nintendo still use IBM to fab the Wii CPU don't they? I think it could be a really good fit. Looking at Llano and *Trinity, 200 ~ 320 shaders might be kind of ish what you might expect to get on a 45nm SoC and so even that could fit current developer comments.

*Edit: actually scratch that about Trinity, looks like the GPu cores are bigger:

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/26...more-efficient

It's weird how the expectations have ballooned over the last year. Nintendo was pretty careful to downplay hardware capabilities, to the point where at E3 it wasn't even immediately clear there was new hardware. And a bunch of non-committal, diplomatic, PR comments from devs haven't really given any stronger impression than, "Oh, yeah. It's pretty good, I guess. We think the controller might be cool". But its legend has grown to the point where the faithful all thought it was secretly really powerful and that it contains mysterious components that auto-magically triple its capabilities, and just wait until they activate the I/O processor!

My guess, it's a single chip. 200-300 DX10.1 generation shaders. 3 OoOE PPC cores at ~2.5 Ghz. Better at certain things than either the PS3 or 360 processors, but with lower maximum vector capabilities causing issues. No more than 16 MBs EDRAM as cache for the CPU and 1GB of fairly mundane RAM: DDR3 or maybe GDDR5 on a narrow bus. Manufacture on 45nm, lean on considerable talent of internal studios and call it a day.

Im pissing my self reading all these more recent 'leaks' we were talking about 800 shaders..around january time...it just gets worse and worse.

Well, everything we're hearing places Wuu either on a par with PS360, or below. Which, if taken at face value, means Nintendo have already done something amazing to come up with such a feable GPU. We had the same thing with Wii. There was no way Nintendo weren't going to have something around R300 level. It would have been dirt cheap and easy to use and...oh. They had 2 GCs ducktaped together. Now that could be excused, by the very tolerant, as necessary for BC, but in reality their choices were real headscratchers. All it really proves is that our sort of logic that takes an economically viable technology of a decent, contemporary quality, can be ignored by engineers who go with choices we never ever would, and the rumours are all pointing that way. It would be hard for Nintendo to come up with a design that wasn't a good bit stronger than PS360, yet they may well do it. ;)

Only if by "everything" you mean gamesindustry's latest article and a single GAF post..
Most rumours are pointing to better, not "below" or "on par".
How much better should be the main topic of discussion, actually.

I'm hearing a lot more negatives than positives, although I'm not following it closely. Nintenod are being coy as ever, which they've been with every piece of low-spec hardware they've released since DS.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-power-reports

And that GI.biz article is reporting feedback from devs, whereas the best counters I've heard are either Pr weighted or unknown tipsters off GAF. Okay, I'm placing some faith in GI's ability to find reliable sources, and they may not have asked a large enough group of devs, but the impression I'm left with is very far from a certainty of greater performance as you believe.

The thing is, the positive remarks come from named, high profile devs, while negative comes from random, anonymouse "sources" - which are you more willing to believe? :)

Yep, out of all the consoles, only Ninty has the track record,skill..and balls...to load their next gen systems with hilariously poor hardware.i wasn't aware of the GC's 'duck taped' together, but anything they can skimp and save from the processors..and cover it over with a gimmick..the better...a sheep in wolves clothing..thats the best way to describe the recent hardware rumours...

I checked back through this thread before I hit the post button on that post. I could find a couple of positive remarks, from Mark Rein who was talking about what Wuu would be, and the Darksiders dev who seems to have been hoping for better and has now supposedly said it won't be very exciting. These anonymous voices are going through a professional game-industry website, and aren't just forum posts. And the public speakers tend to have to be cautious in what they say; devs tend to have to talk through anonymity for fear of negative reprisals, but I image that's less an issue if they want to say glowing things. Would any console company shut-up a loud mouth breaking NDA to say, "this is the greatest hardware ever!!!!"? Dunno, but I imagine them far more likely to shut up a dev saying, "this console isn't all that".

That Eurogamer piece is a regurgitation of the GI.biz article. Regardless, it would take an extreme level of either magic and sorcery or complete incompetence for either a CPU (considering it's OoO) or a GPU designed in the last few years to produce results which are *below* RSX or even Xenos.

Nobody in their right mind would expect a full generational leap from the Wii U, but these recent reports are bizarre.

Not sure of the original sources but these should be direct quotes:
THQ: “WiiU is just alot more powerful than current HD consoles it does 1080p very easy.”

Epic: “It will do things current HD consoles simply cant do its going to be a powerful box.”

Crytek: “WiiU devkits are very powerful,the specs are very good”

Vigil Games: “We had the game at the same level as high end pc version in a matter of days and a few lines of code got the game up and running on tablet in 5 mins.”

EA: "Wii U is not a transitional platform, it is a true next generation system."

A lot can change in a year though, and there's always a pressure to rim any company who's products, services or licences you depend on to make money. Plus the best way to attract a mountain of fanboy wrath is to speak honestly about the strengths and weaknesses of their favourite device!

All it would take is appropriate power and cost constraints. No magic, sorcery or incompetence required. AMD and Intel both put out CPUs and GPUs that fall well below the 360 in the millions every year. Even today.

There's got to be a reason that the 360S with it's 45nm processor and small amount of edram still needs a big chunk of metal and a 92mm fan to keep it cool (quietly). No doubt Nintendo can get much better performance per watt (particularly from the CPU) but if you're working with significantly less power you can only do so much.

This interview was likely a total fabrication on a no-name website.. 1080p is not "very easy" on current-gen games for this system. That has been hinted by pretty much everybody else

It might have had 640 ALUs at some point but clocked reeeally low. So all those stories were really off

Links? Only the "less powerfull than xb360/ps3" bs-rumors floating up last couple days seem to suggest that for what i've been following

People are generally more willing to believe the people saying what they want to hear, regardless of its validity.

The GI.biz article was a little sketchy since I don't believe a knowledgeable developer would phrase things in the way that they reported, but it could have been an error in communication. The day after a different article with similarly sketchy quotes was published on the same website by the same author.

However the quotes people are trotting out to support the "considerably more powerful than PS360" stance are either equally suspect, ancient, generously interpreted, or from business types who aren't going to have a clue anyway. Most recent quotes I've seen are fairly noncommittal, which makes sense given that prerelease hardware isn't something people other than the manufacturer really have any business talking about anyway.

At the end of the day everyone's game is different and everyone is going to run into different idiosyncrasies of the hardware that they like or dislike, so widely varying estimations are to be expected in the first few years. People seem to think of power as a binary thing, but the most likely situation is that a machine seen as "on par" with PS360 will be better than them at some things and worse than them at others.

Then again, it doesn't really matter. I was still seeing "Wii is actually as powerful as Xbox 360 but there's a third party developer conspiracy to make bad games because they don't like the motion controls" on fan sites in 2009. People still have this idea that the PS3 is massively more powerful than the Xbox 360 and all the cross-platform games are worse on PS3 because of some conspiracy. People will believe that they want to believe, and facts have little place in the realm of console fanboyism.

Except it adds a resopnse from Nintendo, which is, "Specs don't matter. It's all about the games and experience." That's the same coy stance they have taken with other 'underspec'd' hardware, and very different from the pre-Wii Nintendo that bragged about system power the same as everyone else IIRC.
I point you to this post of mine.
"But there are always logical justifications for any given spec of hardware when considered as a business."

Some of these are old, and some are subjective. There's not too much of substance. THQ's 1080p comment and Vigil's are the only pointers to decent performance. The question then becomes, how do you resolve such starkly contrasting rumours? How can the system be very powerful, easily able to do 1080p or PC high settings, and yet also be no better than PS360? Because these positions are pretty irreconcilable, we end up having to pick which set of rumours to place our faith in. I tend to favour the newer rumours as being more accurate to what the final box will be, when from trustworthy sources.

Are "anonymous devs" trustworthy sources? Do the sites spreading 'em originally have even long and good standing reputation behind them?

Considering Crytek has been complaining about power of the consoles IIRC and requesting more more more, their statement should actually mean it indeed is powerfull [at least compared to todays consoles]

In the case of GamesIndustry.biz, yes, I consider them having a decent reputation in a way I wouldn't maybe IGN.

You're right, as he's referring to actual devkits, and not just 'Wii U should be very good'.

The quote from Gearbox (in Nintendo Gamer magazine) "They’re late in the cycle so they’ve got this really great processor." It seems like they are saying it's competing favorably with the last gen, but they don't even considered it next gen. It's a weird PR move.

I never get tired of just how inaccurate rumors based on factual information get.

When IGN leaked the GameCube specs they had a copy of the final development manual, as a data source it doesn't get much more error free, the resulting article was still wildly inaccurate. Largely because Matt who wrote the article wanted the GameCube to be more powerful, so he drew conclusions from unrelated statements in the manual and published those, under the guise of distilling the information he distorted it.

Over analyzing quotes is a recipe for reading into them what you want them to say, rather than what the person originally intended.

Kind of confirms what I heard and sounds like a GPU wsippel and I "designed" based on that.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...ostcount=12053

You are a gentleman & a scholar, preparing for another lengthy post.

So if Nintendo has actually decided to go with a special GPU wouldn't that create a situation almost like the Wii when the other companies come with their next-gen consoles?
Couldn't it create a similar negative effect because if you wanted to take advantage of the whole GPU it would require you to create special code or even build the whole engine up from scratch or do you think these effects could be incorperated like a post process effect which would make implementation alot easier?

But I guess it's safe to asume large 3rd party engines(Unreal/Crytek) would use these features in their engine seeing Nintendno are testing and maybe developing on these engines themselves so they could ship out the engine when someone aqquires a dev-kit. Or is this ludicrous thinking?

Also other than GI what kind of things would the fixed functions be? What could we expect?

Fixed function GI :?:

I don't know what you guys (Li Mu Bai, etc) are on about, but what relevance is there supposed to be now? We've moved away from fixed function/"hardwired shaders"/HW T&L for good reason.

IF some common task like GI could be run on optimal fixed-function shaders at considerable performance advantage, it'd make sense. Pretty much every game style can benefit from good GI approximation. Otherwise, if it can't be improved upon versus the performance of programmable shaders, it'd just be a pointless reduction of versatility on the GPU.

Yeah. One of the main reasons is to do stuff on the GPU that has nothing to do with games. I doubt Nintendo cares. Nor should they. I don't think it would be "fixed function" the way Flipper was fixed function, though.

It's taking into consideration that Nintendo doesn't think in "normal" GPU methodology. But it is supposedly true Nintendo has some of their own "touches" in the GPU design. I heard it back in December, and now Li is saying something similar. Though what I heard was more vague leaving me to guess what these touches might be. I'm not up to date enough to properly propose what those features might be with a benefit over modern shaders, but my idea of one of those things being lighting was trying to think in a Nintendo-like manner. And I don't put it passed them to do something like that based on things we've heard (though I think it mostly due to the CPU and porting more so than anything else).

Like I said in the GAF post, that's what I see if the GPU is not a traditional GPU with more shaders.

Shifty gave an example of what I'm thinking, but unable to explain.

Well, I mean there are lots of components that are still carried out via fixed units, but it boils down to math and texture ops. :s The thing is that the "GI approximation" label covers a lot of things e.g. SSAO to SSDO to HBAO or other non-Screen-space alternatives for AO that deal with the shadowing, then there's the LPVs/RSMs, cubemaps, SH lighting coefficients, wavelets etc that deal with the light bouncing and whatnot. So I'm not sure what would be particularly common to all of them except for the fundamentals used in constructing the shaders/textures/volumes.

If we look at shadow filtering, one might build off of say the hardware 2x2 bilinear PCF (per fetch) for shadowmaps and just increase sampling (brute force), or just go in a completely different/better/more efficient direction to shadow filtering (being able to utilize the fixed MSAA hardware ala ESMs for instance). i.e. there's no point to implementing 32x32 PCF in hardware (expensive). :p

I think if we are to look at "common GI" we may as well be considering ray tracing!

I wouldn't know either, but in Nintendo's case I expect it'd be 'their way' implemented in hardware for their first-party needs, and devs would just have that to work with.

BGASSASSIN; What was you original predication form your 'sources' of wii hardware power?...certainly the sheepish comments coming from Ninty doesn't exactly fill its fans with confidence?...Im really trying to think how they could design a gpu.. some 7 years later thats...best case 'on par' with a Xbox 360.....i mean Ninty didn't even try and drum up the excitement...seriously if it was more powerfull in anyway...he would have said so....knowing full well if he did..it would produce more sales....knowing that...he didn't which speaks for its self really.

Still, i can't even fathom how they could make it worse...even a last years Llano was more powerfull...logic tells me that it IMPOSSIBLE for not to be better...it really isnt...ipad 4 will smoke Wii U...thats embarrassing.

A quick look on AMD website at the 4670; 320 ALU's-1gb ram...that alone would smoke a 360 in a console form factor...i mean it HAS to be better...AMD doesn't make GPU's that CAN be worse....i bet its all some kind of trick...baffling.

AMD 4670- -514m transistors
-DX10.1
-Shader model 4.1
-320 shaders/ALU's
-8 ROP's
-32 TMU's
-750mhz
-128bit bus with 1gb ddr3..@32gb p/s
-Retailed @ £55 sept 08..

That compares with a comparitively anaemic Xenos..with half the TMU's...2/3 shaders... 3/4 frequency....DX9.0c shader model 3.0.... 1/2 ram with 3/4 bandwidth...that came out in 2005...seriously they CAN'T make a worse GPU in 2012..if they tried.

Al, that is exactly what I was going to bring up (just with more words, less clarity, and 110% less dream wrecking). Just browsing thing a developers Siggraph stuff no how they did their "GI" shows a host of techniques needed. I have no clue how you even design a fixed function addition for all of those techniques as many are quite divergent in not only their task but what they are doing. It is the rise of programmable shaders that even allowed these "hacks" to come about. And the other problem you note is even if you could accelerate a set standard of GI hacks you are effectively stuck with it, and all the drawbacks of such. Kind of like the ol' DX7 and DX8 days where GPUs saw a rise in nice bells and whistles but those bells and whistles were pretty much the same in every game.

Of course if they mean a real "unified GI" approximation, seeing as such an approach hasn't been effectively programmed on GPUs (or CPUs) at anything remotely acceptable speeds (we are talking this stuff is slooooow on NV 580 SLIs on the most simple scenes) there is no way it could be a throwaway addon to a GPU.

Ok, now I will cease crushing Wii U fans dreams. See Al, you don't need to go godZILLA on everyone's hopes. Maybe you should just change your name to, urhmmm, I dunno, AlZilla? :P

How much bigger do you think the iPad chips are going to get? They are not going to get magically faster anytime soon in terms of frequency (power sucking) and new processes are further in between and not giving the huge frequency bumbs at the same power we used to see. Seeing as the current iPad is shy of 30GFLOPs and trying to power a high resolution screen I see no way the iPad4 will be even half the current consoles. Even if you consider a transition to 28nm (+ 100%), a strong shift toward the new area budget to the GPU where the GPU swallows more of the new real estate like how Intel and AMD APUs are (+ 50%) and a 20% jump on base clocks, generously assuming that they can keep the same die size, same power, and increase clocks (not gonna happen most likely) you are ending up at less than 4x faster than the iPad3 which is about half as fast as a current console in raw shader computation power. There is no way an iPad4 is going to smoke a WiiU.

Ha! You speak like that would be some kind achievement...i was saying it in jest...but seriously it won't be a million miles off...

..CPU wise it mosy likely be equal...if A6 follows the same design principles as A5X..then we could well see..4 ROGUES slotted in instead of SGX 543's..that alone would be a quantum leap in performance...2gb lpddr3 ram...with quad channel memory...making 25.6gb/s bandwidth..(not forgetting its a TBDR)...maybe ios 6 activates OPENCL OPENGL 4XX...honestly that is certainly feasable..if that was in a console..i would bet that beats all current (Wii U) consoles hands down.
-You disagree with that??

Anyway..its a mute point because i don't think its within the rules of physics for the Wii GPU to be anywhere less than 50% more powerfull...impossible.
Well its 32 gflops..
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5688/a...2012-review/12
Rogue should be many many times that...Xenos only produces 240GFLOPS...

frenchtoast:

Here's the thing: what concerns me most about predicting the hardware power here is the ultimate TDP and cooling solution, and until IBM comes out and says otherwise, I'm strongly in the 45nm camp (not that 32nm fab capacity appears to be in abundance, so it's not a good sign there) for launch. Also, until TSMC shows ungodly ability to expand their 28nm operations, 40nm is what the GPU will be for the near future (besides, it's just simply going to be a lot cheaper for Nintendo).

As an aside, if IBM is having a hand in the GPU fabrication, then 45nm SOI it is (ala 360S design). Either way, we're not looking at 28nm/32nm, so comparing to Llano isn't going to be relevant.

We know that the small case is going to limit the cooling ability no matter what, plus I would be quite disappointed if Nintendo opted for an over 9000RPM turbine just to satiate any supposed beast underneath...

They're probably not looking at nearly the same TDP as the 360S SoP, which is probably in the ballpark of 70W (after subtracting the drives and RAM chips from load power consumption of the console unit). Even if the WiiU could dissipate 70W of heat power (it'll be quite noisy), you'd have to divy that up between the CPU and GPU. So then you'd probably be looking at a 40nm GPU from AMD that is in the range of 40-50W TDP.*

You can see that the 5570 series kind of fits (with some headroom for clock tweaks around 650MHz) within that TDP range. That's pretty much where the 400ALU idea came from. Mind you, it's already in the 600M+ transistor area.

*I think a lot of folks misunderstood the GI/DF article when it compared case size as a measure of computing/graphical power. It just gives a rough idea of the heat dissipation requirements (whilst keeping noise in mind), and then you can begin to look at what's currently available on 40nm that could fit somewhat closely. Ultimately, it is just a rough guess since there are the customizations to architecture that will give different perf/watt plus there's the supposed edram.... I mean, you'd probably have different ALU/ROP/TMU counts and clocks there.


Well, I have my STRONG concerns. I apologize for sounding harshSTRONG. :p rwar

AI;..Impossible...i really can't get my head around it...7 years...a custom designed chip...hell even with the SAME shaders ROPS/TMU's clock speed..just an incease in ram and the efficiency from going with newer parts..shader model 5.0 v 3.0..dx11 class v dx9.0c ...i tell you its impossible...we are getting done up like a kipper! ;)

Well, you'd be discounting the advances since 90nm that allowed for such a small case to be used. :p

I mean, if you look at Gamecube to Wii, you got... 1.5x the clocks for both chips AND a smaller form factor (just over half the size), and that's after two full node reductions (180nm -> 130nm -> 90nm).

No you miss read me..i agree what i mean its impossible for theWii U not to be more powerfull than a 360..just take that 5570..its on another playing field altogether...:wink:

Whats worrying is the sounds coming from Ninty...

Some things to consider though:

- New artitecture: Unlike the Gamecube -> Wii, the Wii U has a brand new artitecture, and from several sources it appears to be a bit different from the 360. This is pre-first-gen for system, so there will be issues with unoptimized middleware and dev-kits that are still going through revisions. While we don't know exactly how powerful the system is, it is not likely signficantly more powerful than the current-gen consoles due to several factors. Game engines that are stilling getting optimized for the Wii U will likely performance below expectations.

- The Wii U controller screen: Depending on what the developers are doing with the other screen(s), it can potentially require a significant amount of resources.

:shock:
Don't scare me like that. Your Ai is Strong, AlStrong!!

Hey you guys don't understand Nintendo only want to top the new iPad and the upcoming new iPad 2... :lol:

I would still be amazed if they manage to under shoot the ps360, that would be a technological "tour de force" imho.

Ha ha..you could grab the worlds top super brains..give them a budget of say £500 million, 7 years...with a challange to bring out a WORSE console than the xbox 360..in 2012...they would FAIL :lol:

Ninty on the other hand are dab hands at pulling poor components out the bag!:razz: check out the 3ds's processing power..lol....genius how they manage to sell that crap.

Surely a shader library or software API distributed in the SDK is cheaper in every way and makes much more sense than putting an additional fixed function hardware pipeline into your hardware in 2012.

The only way I can see this happening is if the built in functions have a significant performance increase.

That's usually the whole point of dedicated silicon. Well, that and predictable performance.

That's settled then, WiiU is powered by Intel StrongARM CPU's :grin:

If Nintendo wants something basically off-the-shelf, cheap and lower power:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4307/a...s-radeon-e6760

35W including 1GB of GDDR5, 480ALUs at 600Mhz, and specifically designed for embedded platforms with a long support lifecycle.

Then team that up with 4 or so PowerPC 476FP cores and some eDRAM on a chip.

I don't see the point in Nintendo going with something weaker than that.

Sounds about right. Just adjust the clocks really. They could go with a higher clock with fewer ALU etc or vice versa. Ballpark.


edit:

We also don't know what the characteristics of the CPU will be. OOOE + high clocks notwithstanding...

But anyways, I'll reiterate that the overall TDP does need to be pretty reasonable compared to what the 360S was dealing out, and I'm sure Nintendo will want to keep fan speeds low enough.

edit2:

Quite interesting to see the different TDP ratings for the 6670. Seems kind of odd to see that bumping the clocks to 800MHz and 4GHz GDDR5 results in 66W TDP up from 35W. Going down to 650MHz for the 6570 yields 60W TDP.

I have to wonder about binning in your embedded example because typically mobile parts do have the better heat-voltage-clocks characteristics. The same might apply in that situation.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4278/a...radeon-hd-6570

Yeah, after I posted that I realized I probably just won myself the "Captain Obvious" award... :sad:

My original prediction came from looking at what was in the dev kit. Nintendo didn't give any GPU specs in their target specs, so that's all I had to work with. So the thought process for me was what would the GPU look like based on what was in the kit? That began to change once I heard things about what the final would look like so as time passed I started considering how a modern GPU with Nintendo characteristics would look.

Pasting what I linked earlier.

Now this is me thinking based on "primitive" ideology, but there does seem to be something to this.

Honestly I'm not even concerned about the GPU. Some have tried to view the " Wii U is weaker than PS360" talk as contradicting others that have said it was more powerful. I never really saw that. Even since Arkam's posts, it sounded like the issue was more on the CPU-side. And since then things continued to point in that direction. To me it meant that either the CPU was a bottleneck or the ones complaining were porting and not bothering with optimizing anything, and in turn blaming Wii U for their work. For there to be comments from those complimenting Wii U, that to me means the latter of those two things for those complaining.

Even then the CPU shouldn't be an issue. The console has an ARM I/O controller, audio DSP, and the console and controller both have hardware codecs for the stream.

And since the Gamecube I don't get hung up on Nintendo comments, or lack thereof, in that regard. After all they said the GC was capable of 6-12M polys/sec and Factor 5 was able to achieve 20M.

I can't wait for the final specs tho at this point I'm ready for anything...
But if indeed they can't match or exceed and in all the scenario I'm going to have a good laugh.
they are better to be super profitable on the device and have spend peanuts in R&D.
It sounds almost impossible... but if they pull it.... their R&D team needs to be sent cupcakes, plenty...
I mean if they are one a budget their is no thinking twice: 1 power a2 module, tiny and cool stuck to a RV730. A 128 bits bus,1 GB of gddr5 and call it day...
I don't even know why they of edram... speak about spending time and silicon on something far from critical if basically you have no horse power....
I mean a power A2 module comes with 4MB of L2, they may move to 2MB, pass on edram and produce cheaper using bulk @40nm ( sansung, tsmc).

Really sounds impossible to fail but I still haven"t dare answered Shifty pool on the matter, my logic conflict with my feeling...

35W may well be too high given the WiiU's form factor and that GPU would be way to big to be integrated into a 45nm CPU/GPU/SOC (assuming they'd want to go that route).

Just a thought, but a SoC and/or customised GPU might explain why Nintendo were using relatively old GPUs in their early development kits. They could represent the point on the Radeon line where the technology branched off to get Nintendo specific customisations and then go to IBM for work on integrating into a single package. Or maybe Nintendo were originally planning on a standalone GPU (back in 2009) and something convinced them to go for something smaller and cheaper.

Until someone sees inside the WiiU or we hear about a GPU fab partner I'll be keeping the SoC dream alive!

Even if Nintendo are taking the SoC route (and I'm not convinced), I don't see why such a GPU would be too big.

Look at Apple's A5X for instance, 163mm2 on a potentially very similar 45nm process, and able to fit into an iPad form factor at a BoM cost of US$23.

A SoC containing 4 PowerPC 476FP cores, an underclocked Turks GPU, and whatever other misc DSPs and IO are required, would probably be around the same size.


Although I don't think it is likely, it would sure be interesting if what you say is true; and AMD is using the opportunity to develop a separate very-low power Radeon architecture for the Wii U, which they would then use as a direct competitor for PowerVR, Adreno, Tegra Geforce, etc.
Just as Tegra's shader cores are supposedly semi-based on the NV40 architecture, a future AMD very-low power GPU architecture could have the RV7xx architecture as its basis.

The size of the PS3 slim doesn't compare that badly to the Wii U when you consider the PS3 slim consumes up to 120W, and has to contain a 250W power adaptor and a 2.5" hard drive in a removable metal caddy as well.

And a small HTPC such as the ASRock ASRock Core 100HT (e.g. http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1568/1/) is only 20% larger in volume than the Wii U despite being built with a degree of user access and servicing in mind.

I know it's not particularly scientific, but here's my thinking:

Look at the GPU on a 32nm Llano, then imagine it on a 45nm process (just the GPU and IO, ignore the bulky CPU). And then add the rumoured 32MB of edram to it.

If Turks were viable in a 45nm, edram heavy SoC then I think you have to wonder why something weaker is taking up about half of Llano.

http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/c...04_404182.html

I was just thinking of them doing a one-off sideline GPU for Nintendo (kind of like Xenos) but I guess any experience they gained would feed back into the main Radeon line (again, a bit like Xenos I guess). That has reminded me of something though, and that's Bobcat.

Bobcat was all about making low power processors that could, using tools, be painlessly scaled in and adapted for different manufacturing processes. Doesn't seem to have worked out so well with their 28nm stuff (which has abandoned GF and jumped to TSMC, incurring a large delay) but 3X whatever is in Zacate (or even 2X with sufficient clocks) could easily be a match for the 360. Maybesortof ...

One of the few things we do know is that IBM is providing the CPU component for the Nintendo Wii U on a 45nm SOI process and it feature IBM's eDRAM technology in some way.

Anway, the PowerPC 476FP, based on its specifications, seems to have a similar design methadology to Bobcat but is smaller (3.6mm2 on 45nm IBM vs. possibly 4.6mm2 on 40nm TSMC), has lower power consumption (1.6W at 1.6Ghz on 45nm IBM vs. ?), and greater theoretical ILP.
Using the Power ISA other than x86 is probably an advantage for Nintendo considering matters of backwards compatibility and porting from the Xbox360 and PS3.

Oh I wasn't talking about using x86, I was talking about using AMD's graphics technology, memory controller and IO and incorporating that into a processor manufactured on IBM's 45nm process (seeing as we know that's what the CPU and probably edram are being made on). Pretty much what the hugely successful 360S CGPU is only with the edram on there as well (less power, less silicon, simpler package).

Doesn't the 3DS even have dedicated VRAM and a second CPU locked out (recently unlocked with newer devkits)? I wouldn't exactly call them using poor components (otherwise why would they go out of their way to stick "exotic" stuff like 1T-SRAM?) but some of their design choices are...unique to say the least.

I'm kinda confused as to whether or not they are going for an SoC design.

The technology in the 3ds is abysmal...seriously...it may have 2 cpu's but they originated from 2003 or something and clocked at a pathetic rate.
the screen resolution/size is poor...the batterylife is poor...and the gpu..well..that originates from 2006!!:eek:

BGASSASSIN; Yea cpu is going to be important..will be very interesting to see what happens with this console....seriously they seem to milk there generous fans a bit too often..theres only so much that can be done with software...the devs wont thank Ninty if they have to redesign ports:sad:

If any of the rumours are to be believed about power of ps4/720 then this may be even worse than wii>ps360

DS/Wii had genius features that were brand new...nintendo did a fantastic job of marketing and to create a little niche for itsself..how ever game quality= revenue tells its own story...
The point being Ninty was able to gloss over the poor hardware with revolutionary gimmicks....unless they havn't told us something..they wont have that advantage this time.

The focus on eDram seems ill adviced... Really with something that could be akin to a RV730 (or less...) Slow gddr5 should have provide enough bandwidth.
I guess Nintendo wants to use some a cheapest ddr3 around. As a trade off they go with a more expansive process that include Edram. They also go for a less dense process (40 vs 45).

Altogether I no longer know what they are doing as far as hardware is concerned. There are workloads where CPU clock is prevalent (stated by many clever persons here) and other situation were SIMD power is relevant. A three cores with low clock (and so low through put) won't cut it.

OoO may make the thing convenient it won't cut it...
Edram may provide more bandwidth but if shader power is not there...
Looking at the system they wanted to put together I wonder how they came to the conclusion bandwidth was the main issue...

IMO even if Wii U retained "DX10.1-level" shaders (which I don't expect), it wouldn't be as bad as the architectural differences Wii had vs PS360. There are two things that Nintendo needs to do that I also expect them to do.

1. Make sure 1st party and 3rd party exclusives look great.

2. Make sure the hardware is capable of receiving ports in the future.

Number 2 will show how much they listened to developers. Though after the software drought they began to see with Wii, common business sense would suggest they will try to avoid that from happening again and do "just enough" with their hardware to achieve that.

People are saying that they will be disappointed if the WiiU is under power compared to the ps360 and wonder how Nintendo could develop something like that. But I think you bring up a point that many forget and that's the small for factor and likely very low power requirements.

I personally would find it very impressive if Nintendo developed a console with the similar processing power of a 360 and but at one third to one half of the 360's power consumption. People need to consider that system design is an optimization of several metrics not just processing power and the console can be cutting edge and not an uber processing machine at the same time.

Honestly I wouldn't because IMO MS and Sony could be more efficient in their cooling/case design.

Anyway back on topic..

I have no doubt that the games will look ''good''..current gen games look ''good''..that depends on what you define as looking ''good''...for 12 months they will look like current gen...long in the tooth but ''good''....then when PS720 arive they will start to look ''last gen''=''not good''...don't forget Sony and Microsoft also have Gimmicks..so the 'niche' no longer exists..
The second point is related to the first...if they havn't listened to the devs..and they can't port properly..then they are screwed...sales this time won't be a good as the Wii...there will be even less incentive to make the effort...for that NOT to happen, we need to see 5570/6670 gpu +quad OoO POWER 6 derivitive.and at least 1gb ram....with decent bandwidth 80-100gb/s.
No it can't be cutting edge with out advanced processing...because apart form the controller input..processing is all there is to designing the hardware that makes the difference....that dosn't mean they need to go crazy..just a nice ballance where they use modern parts...without going power mad..there is a little pocket ready made for Ninty to survive..a bit like AMD.....but they need to get the right ballance...bringing in hardware thats at best 'on par' with consoles 7 years old isn't one of them.
Here check out these few posts in the other thread to see whats possible in that form factor..really you don't need to work at NASA to able to pull it off in 2012;
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread...31379&page=448

Even if they do well and aren't screwed with ports, I don't expect Wii U to sell as much as Wii. However I expect the console market to shrink next gen anyway, but that's another story.

POWER6 is in-order, so we can eliminate that and from what I understand three OoO cores are still the target. There was a memory target range with 1.5GB (at least last year) being the max and lherre indicated Nintendo was going with the max. I also don't see it having that much BW, but we'll see. The target eDRAM amount was 32MB, so I don't know if that is still the same or saw an increase. Then of course is wondering how this GPU is going to turn out. That might be a part of why Nintendo didn't give GPU specs in the early target specs.