If 35 Watts is too high it's a given that's the system will lag behind the ps360 significantly.
Damned some hd6570 goes with passive cooling (you need an airflow in the box but still).
You could put a SoC and the ram within that power budget (below 40Watts).

Clearly either Nintendo needs to stop designing the box before the hardware or they were flat out lying with their tech demo and things got significantly downgrade.

We heard a lot of talk from THQ which some CEO declared that they may not be here in 6 months (sad matter of a fact but not my point) about the WiiU and darsider II, not that much from the other editors. I wonder if they saw through the screen of smoke and gave up on porting anything AAA to the box.
No HDD, underpowered, even simple ps360 ports may not prove worse the effort.

Edit I edited so it was clearer but basically I think Dr Evil made a better job at it, thanks by the way ;)

That last part of your post.... I cannot understand :P

I'll take a shot :)

He says that THQ (which appears to be in deep trouble) is the only one talking about WiiU, liolio is starting to feel that perhaps other publishers have figured out that WiiU is too underpowered for making ports to it worthwhile.

Well from what you have described that already looks better than PS360..so as long as they get the missing peice in place then i would consider buying one....thats a big ''IF'':grin:

Some analyst recently claimed Activision is not supporting Wii U, which I guess is new speculation if true. I guess it was unclear before?

Nah. That analyst got a quote from Activision and reinterpreted it to mean no support. The quote essentially said they haven't made any game announcements for Wii U. Nintendo hasn't made any game announcements. Activision's CEO said they will support Wii U.

http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6317743...pporting-wii-u

Perhaps I'm looking at the 4cm fan and 45nm things a bit too hard, but given just how low I think Nintendo need the BoM to be and how limited the cooling will be the be I'm just not expecting that much. I think it can get into the same ballpark as the 360 while drawing substantially less power because they should be able to save loads of power on the CPU by clocking lower.

BTW I'm expecting lower peak flops from the WiiU CPU, but that it's more resistant to code that makes the 360 bum out (OoOE, bigger L2, possibly higher L2 bandwidth, lower latency memory access etc). Super optimised 360 stuff might pose a problem though I guess.

At the time I thought the tech demos looked nice but couldn't see what was "next level" about them. Screen grabs showed that Link in the Zelda demo was actually really simple and low detail - way, way below a Mass Effect character, for instance. It's also possible that early dev kits may have been more powerful in some ways than the final system. As with the Xbox 360, perhaps final clocks won't quite live up to early expectations.

Maybe it won't be as easy to just throw a PS360 game at the WiiU and have it gobble it up as people were expecting, but with sufficient work the ports will probably be fine. I guess that could give put off some publishers that aren't expecting great market penetration with the hardcore.

I think it would be fun to see what people's lowball expectations for the WiiU are. At the very outside I think it might be possible for Nintendo to get away with a SoC with something like 160 shaders, 12 TMUs and 8 ROPS - at something like 700 mHz that would fit the rumour of "fewer shaders" while still giving you about the same minimum performance. I'm hoping for something better though.

If they have the nerve to release that in Late 2012..and sell it at anything higher than £80...they deserve what will happen to them..

I remember there being a more up to date version of this GPU Bill of Materials spreadsheet: http://vot03w.bay.livefilestore.com/...pu%20price.jpg

Anybody have it or can link to it?
Or does anybody know what price AMD sells the Radeon e6760 at?

I still think Nintendo could fit a 480 shader GPU or APU into a US$130 total BoM.

If Nintendo decided to stick a low end modern GPU in there. Say a HD73XX or something then isn't it feasible that it would still be outperformed by the 6-7 year old GPU's in current gen consoles?

Everything below Cape Verde will be either a previous-gen renaming or something inside an APU, so the HD73xx are actually a Cedar (80sp VLIW5, 8TMUs, 4 ROPs).

But yeah, a console with a Cedar would be awfully weaker than Xenos or RSX+Cell, unless it was clocked at 1.5GHz or something.

For the ease of porting it would be better for Nintendo to go with something which has no bottlenecks compared to Xenos. Caicos may be theoretically as powerful as Xenos but specifics such as having half the number of ROPs and TMUs could be a problem.

I still think a Turks based GPU is the most likely and logical choice. A custom-designed ultra-low voltage Radeon for use in future tablet designs as well would be my second, but much less likely, guess.

Is there anything more in gaming using edram:?:


http://www.advancedsubstratenews.com...ibms-32nm-soi/
Could they be using 32nm now, after all, a year and a half is a lot of time in microprocessor time?


Quite interesting to see that a 4770 card would only cost ~60$, that is only a litle more than what many XB games ask as minimun specs for their PC counterparts.

So going back to the $180 rumour, with $50 for the controller, what can they get for $130?

I'll throw the first rock:

- $25 for bluray drive (without bluray media capabilities, so they're only paying for hardware)
- $7.5 cooling solution
- $10 case
- $7.5 PCB
- $10 for power regulators, connectors and additional logic
- $5 for 8GB eMMC
- $5 for WiFi and Bluetooth transmitters
EDIT: missed the RAM: $10 for 2GB DDR3 1333MHz

Which leaves with.. $60 for CPU and GPU.
EDIT: $50 for CPU+GPU with the RAM..

I guess.. $30 should be good enough for at least a Turks-class GPU at 40nm, am I right?

EDIT: If it's $25 for both GPU and CPU.. maybe they can still do with Turks-class GPU..

Anyone have a idea how much cost 360/PS3 CPU+GPU+Ram now? If it is (eg 45$) it would have a quite a bit to spend it seems (see below).

Anyway, reposting the above:
http://vot03w.bay.livefilestore.com/...pu%20price.jpg

I edited my post in order to include the RAM too.

I've seen an updated version of that components list, and it had up to the Northern Islands graphics cards.. I think I remember seeing it in the Southern Islands thread, but that thread is now some +200 pages long and I don't remember when I saw it..

Here is a newer BoM chart:
http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/1461/q2msa.gif

I wonder if you should also include power supply cost, perhaps about ~$15?
~$45 left to play with
$12 2GB DDR3
$33 for CPU+GPU

You can find a 2GB DDR3 1333MHz stick for $10 in retail, so I doubt the price at millions of units would be more than that. A safest bet would be in the $6, but $10 is the absolute maximum, unless they're going with much faster DDR3.

A Turks class GPU would rip Xenos a new one though - with ease, even if underclocked to well under the PC speeds. So it doesn't sit right with the current rumors.

A 4770 is even faster than Turks, by quite a long way in fact. There's no chance the rumors would be comparing WiiU to the current gen consoles if it were packing one of those, it's getting on for 4x the overall performance.

I'm not sure what console ports would be quoting it as a minimum spec but their either leaving a massive margin of safety or the games are horribly ported. Any console port should be playable on something half as fast with at least console settings / performance even on the PC.

Ok, I was just basing it of the chart. I also expect them to atleast use faster DDR3, if they go this route.

12 TMUs would make more sense with 240 shaders, like, half a "turks" GPU, I think their "Caicos" GPU have 160 shaders but only 8 TMUs (that's with 67mm2 die size), well, at least on the PCs this tiny GPU seem to perform better than the 2005 GPUs on newer games,

You guys need to wake up..your being tricked!! a console can't be made to be less powerfull than 360 in 2012..its impossible.:razz:

Seriously..12 TMU's??....RSX had what? 24??...Xenos 16?? seriously?
160-240 shaders??..no chance, how would that system compare to an S4 Pro? Adreno 320...4x Kraits @ 2.5ghz??...don't get me wrong..i don't think that would beat the snapdragon..but not by a million miles it wouldn't...

If Ninty was seriously going to be this stingy..they could have got Nvidia to make them a custom Tegra 4 layout or something...Even that S4 Pro could be overclocked....i don't believe the rumours..its nonsense for 2012.

I think that you are right (after reading the rumors about Nintendo being out for costs reduction).

For the GPU I pretty much agreed with Rangers that a down clocked RV730 would do the trick.
Actually more half a RV740 than a RV730 as the latter is a bit "strange" (8 40 wide SIMD vs the usual 80, with a lot of texturing power vs latter architecture).

I would discard GDDR5 as it is 3 times more expansive than DDR3, at least in large quantity. So edram may have a role to play in rendering (more on that latter).

Overall I would agree with you 2 SIMD may be enough still if it's a SOC and assuming low power CPU cores (4 power a2 are ~9Watts and CPU issued from IBM embedded parts should be in the same ball park or lower) I would think that 700MHz is too high. Low power llano SKU (using better process) are clocked in the 450MHz range.

But overall along with the fact that specs seems to be a moving target I'm close to dismissing a SoC all together. SoC are complex design there is not playing with the specs that much.

Accordingly to AMD own numbers the HD6450 has BOM of 38$ (I believe that the version with 512 MB of DDR3). It's a tiny chip 67 sq. mm

I can't see Nintendo going with a chip (for me 45nm one / speaking of the CPU) big enough so it could embark enough edram for make it relevant for rendering. Not to mention to complication of having the the GPU to access this edram.

As I see it the CPU chip could cost as much if not more than the GPU (I know that AMD price is for the whole GPU including RAM). At this point I would assume that the cpu will be less than 100 sq. mm too. I would (again) discard edram as being relevant to rendering.

So putting altogether, I could definitely see Nintendo shipping something like this:
CPU:
Tri cores from the embedded line.
OoO, no SMT
2MB of edram (the L2 cache basically)
CPU speed could be set anywhere between say 1.5 and 2Ghz
64bit bus to either 512MB of ram.
RAM would be DDR3, clock speed anywhere between 533 and 800 MHz
Bandwidth to the main ram would be anywhere between 8.5GB/s and 12.8 GB/s
between 10 and 15 watts

(I'm using the info from this page because I believe that if that kind of budget ram is relevant to AMD low end gpu it is to Nintendo too).


GPU:
Caicos/ HD 6450 / HD 6400M
160 Stream Processing Units
8 Texture Units
16 Z/Stencil ROP Units
4 Color ROP Units.
64bit bus to 256MB of VRAM
RAM would be GDDR5, clock speed 800Mhz.
Bandwidth to the VRAM would be 25.6GB/s
I'm using AMD own data (the same as above) and I chose the slowest option for the gddr5 (for price and mem controller power consumption).
Then there is the clock speed. Anand gives the hd6450 TDP @750Mhz with 900MHz GDDR5 at 27Watts. It's too high. So I already cut the ram speed I would also cut the chip clock speed.
I may put the clock around 500Mhz (it could end lower).
I would not be surpised if the power budget for the GPU is in between 15 and 20 Watts. At 650 MHz the hd5450 is almost 20Watts and that's with DDR3. So taking in account the power cost of GDDR5, sadly ~500Mhz sounds right. That's 160 MFLOPS

Both chips could be connected by a pci express x8 link.
------------------------

That's pretty much it, Edram is too complicated for rendering especially as the wiiumote ups the requirement for the framebuffer (two of them screen and WiiU).

I know fans will try to kill me but I believe that it makes a lot of sense, 256MB may make up for the higher cost of gddr5 vs ddr3 and Nintendo needs that bandwidth.
512MB freed from the FB requirement should be an improvement over the ps3.
The system would consist of two tiny and cool chips, max tdp would be 35Watts. Passive cooling and a unique fan in the box for the power supply, the chips, etc. should do the trick.
The cost using numbers given by AMD and extrapolating for the CPU north of 80$ including the memory chips.

Now I'm ready to face the fans hatred :)

EDIT
For the sake of beyond3 article I may push the number of SIMD to three put it would be "much ado about nothing" to go custom vs off the selves part for so low gains.

I'm pretty sure we already know it has between 1 and 1.5 GB of RAM...

Oh yes from which reliable source? the same(s) that touted that the GPU would spurt 800 stream processors?

Target specs.

Sorry but which target specs?
Because wrt the upcoming systems the only one thing we know for sure is that WiiU CPU might be a tri-core that it is made by IBM and includes edram.
The rest (for Nintendo, SOny, Msft) is plain speculation and rumors for now.

If this refers to me, that was me basing that on what the dev kit started out with. The 1-1.5GB is from Nintendo's actual target specs.

Also it will have 3MB of L2 cache split asymmetrically among the cores and 32MB of eDRAM capable of 720p w/ 4x MSAA or 1080 in a single pass.

But yeah what you're saying spec-wise is very off.

Really? Seeing the trend is generally moving towards deferred rendering that won't be enough for 4xMSAA.

Where did you even get those specs? From stuff showed at E3 nothing had any AA and all of them were 720p native, not 1080p.

I was not particulary refering to you hence the (s) at the end of same ;)

I would be surprised if that turns out true.

3MB of cache is not an issue with edram. But I don't get the split asymmetrically thing. If there is more than 3 cores it could make sense but still be weird.
IBM stated that there is edram ion the WiiU CPU that's an official statement.

32MB of edram I don't byte in it either. 1) It would be costly 2) it's a flat out bad decision vs more raw power (especially with their own late comments on the matter) 3) 32MB is perfect for x4 AA @720p too bad there is also the WiiU screen. All this sounds like made out numbers that rings well to me at least. The 360 came with 10MB that was 'odd' vs either 720 and 1080 rendering requirement (for forward rendering). Like Pettrucci song "mind carrying the solo" I think "production cost carrying the design" not nice figures.

Another point is with the kind of power the WiiU may end with whether it's just below, on par or just above the ps360 I'm not sure that 1 or 1.5 GB would make a difference just cost more.
A 256MB increase in main RAM vs the PS3 may do the trick as far as convenience is concerned for the devs.

I don't byte in it, sorry. We should know soon. I would happily be proved wrong as my wife kind of green light the buy of anything Nintendo but I don't I'm picky ;) ( and I don't care for their exclusives).


Overall I see no reason with that kind of specs and "target specs" for a real Nintendo spoke person, not a rumors or leak, to come out of the wood to state what he stated.

Haha. Ok then as I was saying 640-800 ALUs.

That said, if you don't want to believe actual target specs, I don't know what to tell you. But a good portion of that came from lherre whom we know has a dev kit.

He told us the cache was split asymmetrically and that one core essentially works as a "master core" and has more cache than the other two. This means that core has at least 1.5MB.

He said it also had a memory range and based on what he said indicated they were going with at least 1GB, but were going with the max. I got the actual numbers (1-1.5GB) from someone else.

The eDRAM amount came from multiple places and all said the same thing.

If you notice Nintendo seems to be going for 3x the cache, eDRAM, and system memory of the 360.

The problem is you're saying it's unbelievable based on your assumption of the power. And saying they won't do that because you don't believe it will have the power to justify having that when that came from Nintendo themselves. I can only say that I guess it will have the power to justify having those things based on what you're saying.

The thing is Nintendo didn't give GPU specs early on and still don't seem like they've totally given them, if at all yet. They only gave a codename for the GPU. That I also confirmed from multiple places. But when looking at the dev kit, you're proposing something weaker than the underclocked GPU in the early kit. At least Rangers was more in line with that.

Even zelda demo looked like is going that way.

I was like Rangers expecting something that kind of match a RV730 or more half a RV740, that's a year ago.
I find it tough to believe, it doesn't add at all with the noise around including the one made by Nintendo. That's all for me on the topic, W&S.

EDIT
May be if you come with a nice photoshop I'll change my views (cf the rumors of day) :lol:

Oh I definitely agree those demos didn't have AA. As for the specs, I wasn't the first to post them in this thread, but I have been able to confirm them.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread...79#post1572779

Haha. I'll get right on the 'shop. But it seems that with the GPU, the key is figuring out what type of Nintendo tweaks are we looking at. It seems like we won't be able to gauge the GPU's power in a traditional sense.

Actually, it's also known for a fact that WiiU GPU is AMD Radeon HD custom design ;)

Indeed


http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases...011june07.aspx

For what it's worth even a hd5450 with 256MB of vram would qualify as a custom part :lol:

That's for the "bad spirit", still we haven't heard any nose about that part being taped out, at the same time I can understand the usual pc rumors site having no interest on the matter.

Yes, but some AMD spokesperson said in an interview with Golem (large German tech site) at E3 2011 that the GPU was not based on any existing Radeon chip.

Can PowerVR Rogue in iPad 2013 topple rival potentially Wii U? The bumb is rumored to be almost 10x from current A5x

I'm pretty sure that's near impossible.
And the next next ipad can only be faster than Wii U if the console manages to underpower even the lowest expectations we've seen so far.

And Jen-hsun and Kutaragi both claimed that the RSX was a custom part.
Seriously, how could an AMD spokesperson say anything else? "Yes, it's based on HDXYZ" would of course completely break all NDAs, and be a terrible blunder.

Being based on AMD Radeon tech isn't a problem as it is arguably just about as good as it gets for stationary console purposes, why on earth should they spend major effort reinventing the wheel? It would be a waste of time, money and engineering resources. There are a few things that are unnecessary on consoles that can be cut from a desktop design in order to increase efficiency, and there is going to be a direct communication path to the CPU that is not PCI-express. So off the shelf, no, but of course it's going to be based on what they have. And that's a good thing.

Trying to analyse/predict something without doing any research into what's already known on the subject is never a good idea..

Earlier in this thread, it was revealed that there is some fixed-function aspect as an aside to the standard unified shader architecture. Someone has, then, decided to "reinvent the wheel" and has put some heavy customization into a chip. This work was done from 2009-2011.

Provided you actually believe that.

A broader issue is semantics. How much does a GPU have to change before you can legitmately call it "new"? But the statement that the WiiU GPU won't be based on an existing chip doesn't make sense unless AMD has designed a raytracing chip for the console. It's NDA talk.

You probably mean "speculated" rather than "revealed".

Custom just means it's a unique ASIC and not the same chip as you'd buy for your PC. The word says nothing about how much was customized. So RSX was custom even if they did nothing other than change the memory controller.

Then again, it's still pretty much G71 with lower memory bandwidth and the performance on the desktop part is a good indicator of what the RSX can do.

So yeah, if it's basically a Turks with an ARM core and audio DSP we can still assume most of its capabilities will be equivalent to what a Turks can do (unless the CPU is doing lots of shader work like what happens in the PS3).

Yes and no.

The audio DSP (if true) would give better sound and would be able to offload 8-10% from a console CPU IIRC from seeing some slides of typical CPU (xenon?) workloads and free it to visuals/physics/AI whatever.

It can have a pretty standard GPU, but if it does have some fixed function units or co-processors, one can only guess what they do/offload and guess what the console can do (just like PS3/RSX it can do much more than anyone could ever think, given RSX).

Personally I would be quite happy with some fixed function units.

I wasn't commenting on the fact that it may or may not have fixed function, custom parts in it.
I just said that if it's as "custom" as RSX was, then the difference from the desktop counterpart won't be very large.

So the fact that they said it's a custom part isn't 100% proof that the GPU is altered in a way that it would make a difference in performance-per-clock, compared to the laptop/desktop counterpart.

Devkits (E3 demo units in a black metal case) have two fans as far as I can tell - one 50mm or 60mm intake and one 40mm exhaust. It's possible the actual console uses a radial intake fan plus 40mm axial exhaust.

If it uses a radial fan, having another fan in-line with the flow would just act as an airbreak. Radials have quite high static pressure; a second fan would not be neccessary.

Yes.
The word "custom" carries an air of the exotic, performance and particular care - glamour if you wish. In that context it is understandable that you don't go out of your way to clarify that your "customization" consisted of cutting ROPs and memory bus in half. :)

So while saying that the Wii U GPU is a custom job is going to be true by definition, saying that it isn't based on other AMD products is guaranteed to be false, even ATI/AMDs desktop products show very large similarities between generations. They typically introduce a new series every year, and most building blocks of the chips are either unchanged or somewhat refined. Just as it is with CPUs, these days.
When a Hot Newness is introduced, and the new stuff is presented and hyped, make the thought experiment to detract that from the whole, and look at its shadow instead, all the things that were left as is.
That's not meant as negative critizism at all, evolution is a powerful force.

The current SGX543 mobilechip designs are from 2008-2009 with just more cores. Lot of people seemingly dont know how big deal Rogue will be. It will bring mobile graphics to parity with current-gen consoles. From the tens of Gflops to hundreds. It will absolutely be "on par" with Wii U next spring.

People will be shocked at the graphics it will push and pundits will claim doom to consoles. There is no reason for Activision or EA to not put big titles there when Apple provides a new controller.

I totally agree...Rogue is a quantum leap over SGX 543...plus lets not forget A6X will have quad channel lpddr3..maybe 2gb ram...at least 2 cortex A15's?...also bearing in mind its TBDR so even better bandwidth budget?...Like i said, if the Wii U doesn't arrive with at LEAST 2x the performance of 360 its dead after 12 months.

Why waste £300 on a box thats plugged into the wall, with a cheap tablet as its main selling point and out of date graphics..when you can just buy a new new ipad??:razz:

EDIT; Use Airplay to connect to tv..jobs a good un!

Where are the numbers that back up Rogue's hundreds of gigaflops and (even more importantly) memory/bandwidth setup?
For reference - will people be saying the same thing when Microsoft introduces their tablet for the next xbox and the ipad 5 or 6 "beats" it?

Because it'll have unique software, controls that don't require fingers to get in the way, and battery life longer than 2 hours when playing games.

I'm just guessing here, anyway. Maybe the actual system has no exhaust fan at all. All I know is that the devkits had two fans, and that the E3 demo units looked like they were designed for a much higher airflow compared to the Wii.


Question: If PowerVR chips are that amazing, why aren't we using them in PCs anymore? Right, because they're not. They're damn nice for sub 1W systems, but that's pretty much it. Rogue won't change that.

Rogue certainly looks like a great GPU and a generational step forward for mobile graphics. I think it'll be closer in power to next gen console GPU's than current mobile GPU's are to Xenos/RSX. However the bit I've highlighted above is quite an odd statement. Because not only do you not know what kind of performance we'll see from Rogue in 2013 (It seems Rogue will start out at around 200Gflops, which is below 360/PS3 GPU's) but you also don't really know what WiiU will be. Rumours and vague comments are not enough to compare graphics power.

That's just how he is. Says outlandish things and then won't respond when you call him out on it.

Well standard wisdom would be lets wait for final products.
There is not that much magic in the silicon world and the sane attitude is too wait for product using this tech and see which performance at which power budget.

there is not disputing that they might reach 200MFLOPS but at which power? With Windows 8 running on ARM there might be ARM based netbook in the pipe, may be ultra book too. Those devices power budget has nothing to do with nowadays tablets or phone. PowerVR seems clever enough to consider this market (may be even a bit higher) and that's not the issue.

It doesn't hurt not waiting for facts instead of being close to personal attack and the issue is the pretty lose usage of the world "mobile". Are netbook ultrabook or even nowadays windows tablets "mobile" products? I would not say so they go with power budget order of magnitude higher than "mobile devices".

Who is outlandish the one that want concrete implementation of the tech or the one that take for granted an increase in power efficiency of one order of magnitude by going form 45/40 nm lithography to 32/28 nm?

Is this a serious question? The point is Wii U will release 7 years after Xbox 360 and now PowerVR mobile graphics technology can deliver same quality performance with low power consumption. Yes, Wii U might be slightly better but still for most consumers its the same. Even X720

Oh boy. Looks like DigitalFoundry agrees

Care to explain such? Seems contradictory.

If you are talking about degrees there are current GPUs on mobile at nearly 30GFLOPs (roughly 15% as fast). Looking at a 200GFLOPs mobile chip means you need a console in the 1400GFLOPs range to be a relatively equal range difference. But that isn't the only factor, e.g. bandwidth (for all the consoles/PC memory architecture mobiles, with their very stricture power requirements and small form factor have are very limited to whatever low hanging fruit passes on to the mobile space.

Which goes back to your own comment, "Rumours and vague comments are not enough to compare graphics power". While you qualify your comment with "I think" instead of the assertive "absolutely" (tsk tsk to those placing so much faith in rumored specs, especially when some of the underpowered WiiU rumors mention it has really high FLOPs but not so high real performance, i.e. a 500GFLOPs WiiU could be architecturally better than a 200GFLOPs Rogue, in which case the whole "absolute" is really "not even close") I think, I know dangerous thinking, you made a very similar equation in regards to Nintendo's competitors. :wink:

Not going off of rumors, but as industry trends go, mobile has improved dramatically from the beginning of the 2000s to today. A lot of low laying fruit has already been captures by current mobile hardware--even though they are older architectures--compared to what was available in 2005. Due to process limitation, area limitations, TDP limitations, form factor limitations, BOM considerations, etc the pace of mobile advancement will be more inline with that of the PC.

They also let out that shitty article/ shoes polishing about Kepler.
I'll tell you something Granmaster did a really good jobs but there are people in the embedded tech forum that works for the aforementioned company(ies).

I would be surprised if they came here to say that rogue will come close to 200MFLOPS with the ~1 Watt power budget of an iPad (and that's with the CPU and the RAM). Actually even if they did I would be be surprised it turns into a product (like using a ginormous chip, and highest bins parts at low clock, etc. so won't happen in real product). One can dream though.

PowerVR have a great product with rogue that might allow them to address both the mobile market and the ARM/windows8 devices (with higer power characteristics). They might have quiet an edge in power efficiency (and what they do out of low bandwidth) vs AMD, NV and Intel.

I've been out of the loop the last few days, any new rumors or speculation on Wii U's GPU?

Nothing new no, sorry.

I kinda figured that.

If you've seen the posting history in this thread, you would know what I'm talking about. I wouldn't consider that anywhere close to personal also. :smile:

Looking back on my post "inept" was too strong of a word to use regarding developers. Perhaps it was tainted by a biased source. (this particular one was developing a proprietary engine) Although my statement regarding middleware optimization was correct, & still is. Progress is advancing rapidly, & has been made even since my last post in fact. A rather recent March update to the SDK (ver. 2.03) which in all probability is linked to the upcoming V5 development kit. As it stands, afaik the most popular middleware engines are running optimally with all features intact. (not enough shaders would render this impossible)

What did not occur to me was why was/is Nintendo testing & optimizing these various engines, adjusting & tweaking hw specifications, etc.? From its inception Nintendo was touting the Wii U's ease of portability, why the change? The most obvious answer was 3rd party engine compatibility, though it had to be more than that. I spoke of the Nintendo "footprint," & it could have indeed been larger than I initially thought.

Were 3rd parties were having trouble initially with the CPU perhaps? Instruction sets are typically tailored, or highly customized by the console vendor based upon their particular performance needs. IIRC, the GC's Gekko had an additional set of 50 instructions to the PowerPC 750 on which it was based. (as well as stripping away non-essential features) Nintendo is again going with IBM's PowerPC architecture. The rumored OoOe tri-core CPU with 2-way SMT appears legitimate. Why this seems unbelievable has me bewildered, & questioning posters incredulity. Is this based upon the very cheaply produced, severely underpowered Wii? (which btw was a first on the Nintendo home console front) I would have to assume so. The 32mb embedded ram is not as cost prohibitive as many of you might believe.

Every console CPU & GPU obviously behaves differently, the Xenon is a highly customised variant of the VMX AltiVec unit. Alas, I think that the PS3's PPE & SPEs are irrelevant in this discussion, with the exception of highlighting notably custom platform architecture. Why? Because Nintendo used the 360s' development environment model as a baseline of sorts. The 360's ease of development, ease of PC portability, generally superior versions of multi-platform software, ease of middleware engine adaptability, etc. (as well as seeking developer input from close 3rd parties) Thus we could assume that the Wii U's CPU could be incoporating a more modern VSX AltiVec unit. Though due to its customisation, instruction sets and data-formatting would also have to change. Optimized code for the 360 may run sub-par on the Wii U, (or stall) & this problem is also compounded with its communication/relationship to the GPU. (which is also heavily customized) While by no means a quantum leap over Xenon computationally, its efficiency will be where the CPU differentiates itself. (a penchant of Nintendo's)

It's a developer learning curve that's all, which will be beneficial to native engines much moreso than ported ones. The performance will scale up considerably on proprietary engines I've been told. (much like the PS3, though even more capable) Nintendo did design this platform attempting to be extremely port friendly, though its own software still drove & dictated the initial design & feature set. I've known of the target system specs for some time,& they are indeed accurate. I just do not know what alterations have been made. (as some have) The "target" specifications are what Nintendo told 3rd parties to expect from finalized hardware.

As far as the lighting is concerned, I tried to describe having some fixed functionality in parallel to programmable shaders. What this yields is stable, predictable performance. This is especially important when rendering a seperate viewpoint on the DRC (display remote controller) from what is shown on the main screen. (differing geometry, lighting, shader effects, etc.) I attempted to describe what I was told, I hope I didn't lose any aspects or understanding in translation. I referenced the GC's architecture because there seemed to be parallels. There is definitely a DSP, I read a page back where there was some confusion regarding its inclusion. Why is anyone bringing up the Ipad? I do not want to even enter into this nonsensical debate, the occupy completely different hemispheres.

What is your source for these things? You would know the exact SDK version (v.2.03), what the most up to date dev kit model is (v5), know that all the most popular middleware is running optimally with no disabled features on the WiiU dev kits, etc so I assume you either work with the dev kits yourself, know someone who does and is freely passing you info, or are culling this from the net in which case your tone about what rumors are valid and which ones are not doesn't make any sense. Since you seem absolutely confident in what the WiiU has inside maybe you could give more specifics about the CPU and GPU. I mean, if you can tell us the exact SDK version # surely some data on the current hardware wouldn't be hard to come by?

I'm interested in hearing more about this DSP and what functions it assists the CPU or GPU with. Not that it's all that surprising, if the thing has a set task and does it super fast then good for it. Does the DSP assist in the lighting part of the equations? Rendering from two different viewpoints can't be that difficult, but maybe a DSP can speed up by a large margin?

Audio DSP

Me too.

No contradiction I'm just not expecting any next gen console to have as much of an increase in power as Rogue will have over previous mobile GPU's. I won't claim that will definitely be the case, its just my opinion at the present time. Also I didn't say that would be the case in Rogues first iteration (notice I said it would start at 200GFLOPS, so I was referring to its first iteration there).

I'm expecting Rogues later iterations to be closer to XBox3/WiiU/PS4 than current mobile GPU's are to 360/PS3, I wouldn't be surprised if that happened. Is that really very similar to "Rogue will absolutely be "on par" with Wii U next spring"? :D

We will be getting to the point where only the software will be better.. wireless charging on tablets is not going to far away, the point is hardware wise it will be equalled within 12 months...software wise no it wont...but with W8 tablets around the corner...