Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

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Correct, which is why I used the term "transitional console" months ago when trying to establish a power baseline for the Wii U. The 2-3x power metric comparative to the PS3 I believe is somewhat misleading, or problematic. This is due to what is possible simultaneously & independently on the DRC. Rendering two separate viewpoints, or scenes requires a doubling of various work loads. Most notably geometry, transformation, lighting, shader effects, etcetera. The initial 720p "native" resolution for all current 1st party software was secured to provide very stable & predictable performance in conjunction with heavy utilization of the DRC. (display remote controller) No matter how simplistic or complex the game may be. The system is by no means completely bound to it.



This takes more time, publishers want to simply get the software up & running optimally as quickly as possible. Taking advantage of the architecture of a new system takes time. Batman:AC is definitely taking some advantage of the additional ram, GPU functionality, OoOe, as well as using the DRC creatively rather than simply as a submenu. V-sync is enabled, texture resolution is increased, post-process anti-aliasing, (not present in the PS3/360 versions) as well as additional art assets & geometry have been included in certain scenes. The 3rd party title that will demonstrate the differences most noticeably will be Gearbox's Aliens:CM, but that is a Q1 2013 release. The Wii U's version of Metro:LL is still officially on development hold, though this was showing early potential as well.

The first two visual showcases from Nintendo's internal studios will be Retro & Monolith Soft's titles. Both running on proprietary engines that will demonstrate the Wii U's technical presentation properly. There are still a few announcements left regarding japanese exclusive & multi-platform software, though nothing really exploiting the hardware. (from what I've heard)
What you say about the Wii U, that is going to be better than a lot of people thought it would be, makes a lot of logical sense. I think some people like Patcher and so on didn't believe how capable the WiiU seemed to be, but with posts like yours one feels slightly more educated and can leave the Archie Bunker type of attitude aside.

I am afraid I missed your posts these last few years, until reading this thread, but what you say is very interesting. I wonder if you are a developer or a passionate software or hardware engineer, or whatever, but thanks for sharing anyways.
 
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What you say about the Wii U, that is going to be better than a lot of people thought it would be, makes a lot of logical sense. I think some people like Patcher and so on didn't believe how capable the WiiU seemed to be, but with posts like yours one feels slightly more educated and can leave the Archie Bunker type of attitude aside.

If you believe people who claim info of internal Nintendo projects on the internet.. good luck. Looks like his guesses for E3 never happened and Gearbox is not even working on Wii U at all

Pachter is totally right in his analysis on the Wii U. Another entry to current-gen years too late
 
If you believe people who claim info of internal Nintendo projects on the internet.. good luck. Looks like his guesses for E3 never happened and Gearbox is not even working on Wii U at all

Pachter is totally right in his analysis on the Wii U. Another entry to current-gen years too late

Claiming one person is wrong based on incorrect info and then going to claim Pachter to be right is practically the definition of irony.

You've been singing this same tune since before anyone knew anything, and I still subscribe to the notion that it's getting old.
 
If you believe people who claim info of internal Nintendo projects on the internet.. good luck. Looks like his guesses for E3 never happened and Gearbox is not even working on Wii U at all

Pachter is totally right in his analysis on the Wii U. Another entry to current-gen years too late

What are you talking about? How are you even allowed to post on this forum?
 
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No offense to him but LMB has been "outed" a little bit on GAF. Someone found his GAF posts from 2005 basically going through the same song and dance denial that the Wii/Revolution was going to be underpowered. VERY reminiscent of his posts regarding Wii U today...
 
Another entry to current-gen years too late
Well, maybe so, but does that mean Wuu games won't be any good, or won't look pretty? Of course not. Also, Wuu will be small and easy to fit, even in a cramped home like mine. It will also likely be very quiet, if not near-silent, unlike current consoles - especally at launch. The 360 was a horrible noisemonster with fans that howled like banshees and a DVDROM that sounded like an unbalanced washing machine doing its spin cycle in perpetuity whenever a game was running. The PS3 wasn't exactly silent either, and ran very hot despite its huge, heavy and complicated cooling solution.

Wuu has things going for it, even if not all gearheads want to acknowledge that - which is okay, really. Not everything is for everyone. I just think it's wrong to discount Wuu before it's even launched though.
 
No offense to him but LMB has been "outed" a little bit on GAF. Someone found his GAF posts from 2005 basically going through the same song and dance denial that the Wii/Revolution was going to be underpowered. VERY reminiscent of his posts regarding Wii U today...

Lol..
 
Well, maybe so, but does that mean Wuu games won't be any good, or won't look pretty? Of course not. Also, Wuu will be small and easy to fit, even in a cramped home like mine. It will also likely be very quiet, if not near-silent, unlike current consoles - especally at launch. The 360 was a horrible noisemonster with fans that howled like banshees and a DVDROM that sounded like an unbalanced washing machine doing its spin cycle in perpetuity whenever a game was running. The PS3 wasn't exactly silent either, and ran very hot despite its huge, heavy and complicated cooling solution.

Wuu has things going for it, even if not all gearheads want to acknowledge that - which is okay, really. Not everything is for everyone. I just think it's wrong to discount Wuu before it's even launched though.
I'm all for a "sexy" design point is it doesn't have to rhyme with sucky hardware.
Now we have parts as the A6-4400M that offer comparable (better in some regards) than our 7 year old consoles. It's a salvaged part bu it would be otherwise pretty tiny it has a nice 35Watts TDP. You can fed it using cheap ddr3 ram. It's a Trinity with "half of everything disable pretty much, it would be tiny if it were not a salvaged part.

That's not an optimal design far from that but it proves that for that level performance (matching 7 years old hardware and more) bandwidth is not that critical. SOC have the advantage that they allow really simple design, you have your SoC a 128 bit bus your DDR3 chips and you are ready to go.

What I don't get is that Nintendo doesn't seem bent on beating the ps360 (looking at their comm not at all), they seems to be really concern with BOM so why go with fully custom parts and a design that includes lot of edram?

Doesn't make sense to me and it comes at price, Nintendo have trade extra RAM and extra processing power for lot of edram. While going for a custom GPU they also gave on more modern, efficient and fully featured architecture.

Going with IBM and AMD they should have asked them to integrate existing technologies on TSMC 40 nm.
The SOC could have consisted of 6 off the shelves PPC 470S and 4 SIMD 8 ROPS GPU based on southern Island architecture (like in Trinity). The SOC is linked through a dual channel to 1 GB of DDR3.
(2GB would have been nice though, I searched on newegg 2GB of DDR3 1600 cost 9.99$, faster ddr3 like 1866 costs 16.99. Trinity in its laptop form has been reviewed mostly with the former so it ain't that bad).

That would have been familiar for the devs , like on the 360 the CPU is a SMP set-up you have 6 hardware threads to play with, on the GPU side more like on the PS3 you to be more careful about the bandwidth.

Instead of EDRAM they would have include a clever power management system like in trinity that may have allowed them to grab some extra performances in what is a pretty power constrained system.

For the ref my laptop use a A8-3500M and has a tdp of 35 watts that with a redwood class GPU running at 444MHz and a CPU running at 1.5GHz it runs games in set-up comparable to nowadays console pretty well. (I mean it's not amazing but once you takes in account all the optimizations going in the console realm the things does more than well).

Overall it would still have extra head room vs the ps360 for the wiimote as I would be such a system performs sightly better than the ps360 combo.

My problem with the WiiU now is that it "may" have a GPU a bit more powerful with a lot more bandwidth but it might not be able to make a difference (pretty much like the difference in RSX and Xenos didn't amount to much ultimately from the average pov).

In favor of my straight SoC you have a simple UMA design with no restriction on the render targets sizes, if you want to go with a 64MB G-Buffer ala Killzone, no problemo. The GPU would have support directx 11 features and be more modern.

Then there is the pretty scary remark with regard to the CPU power.
With 6 cores @1.6 GHz, more cache, and a clever turbo mode I would expect that CPU to out perform Xenon on average.

The worth part is I expect Nintendo solution to be more expansive on every regards, from R&D, the size of the chip, the complexity of the mobo, etc.

I'm not an engineers, I don't think Nintendo engineers suck either but there is definitely something wrong in the decision process at Nintendo HQ.
The usage Nintendo envision for its device and the way they plan to market things is one thing, like for the 3DS sucky hardware is sucky hardware.
 
I don't think it's in Nintendo's interest to stick a cut-down PC into their consoles; they're pretty paranoid about piracy, they'd be plenty pissed over there in Kyoto if soon after launch you could emulate the Wuu on a desktop computer and play your Marios and Zeldas without paying Nintendo a penny. Regular PC CPUs don't support hardware encryption to the level Cell and Xenon does, and which Wuu's CPU undoubtedly will also, for starters.
 
No offense to him but LMB has been "outed" a little bit on GAF. Someone found his GAF posts from 2005 basically going through the same song and dance denial that the Wii/Revolution was going to be underpowered. VERY reminiscent of his posts regarding Wii U today...
Oops, I said nothing.

He certainly sounded so convincing, and now I'm afraid to look... !!! Somethings, I just don't want to know. :D
 
Oops, I said nothing.

He certainly sounded so convincing, and now I'm afraid to look... !!! Somethings, I just don't want to know. :D


To be a fair, the Wii specs were somthing of a moving target at one point. Nintendo had originally planned a machine close to the other two HD consoles, but decided on a much much lower powered machine in the end. LMBs posts on GAF may well have been based on the early rumours we were getting.
 
No offense to him but LMB has been "outed" a little bit on GAF. Someone found his GAF posts from 2005 basically going through the same song and dance denial that the Wii/Revolution was going to be underpowered. VERY reminiscent of his posts regarding Wii U today...

Remind me if I missed something but back then he was only giving an opinion based on the same info everyone else had. What he's saying about WiiU now is clearly being presented as inside info.

I have no idea if he really has inside info or not, so I'm not taking any of it as anything but rumour. But his opinion on something 6 years ago doesn't convince me he's a fraud. Also it would have been very easy for him to post under a different name if he wanted to hide his past comments.
 
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I'm all for a "sexy" design point is it doesn't have to rhyme with sucky hardware.
Now we have parts as the A6-4400M that offer comparable (better in some regards) than our 7 year old consoles. It's a salvaged part bu it would be otherwise pretty tiny it has a nice 35Watts TDP. You can fed it using cheap ddr3 ram. It's a Trinity with "half of everything disable pretty much, it would be tiny if it were not a salvaged part.

That's not an optimal design far from that but it proves that for that level performance (matching 7 years old hardware and more) bandwidth is not that critical. SOC have the advantage that they allow really simple design, you have your SoC a 128 bit bus your DDR3 chips and you are ready to go.

What I don't get is that Nintendo doesn't seem bent on beating the ps360 (looking at their comm not at all), they seems to be really concern with BOM so why go with fully custom parts and a design that includes lot of edram?

Doesn't make sense to me and it comes at price, Nintendo have trade extra RAM and extra processing power for lot of edram. While going for a custom GPU they also gave on more modern, efficient and fully featured architecture.

Going with IBM and AMD they should have asked them to integrate existing technologies on TSMC 40 nm.
The SOC could have consisted of 6 off the shelves PPC 470S and 4 SIMD 8 ROPS GPU based on southern Island architecture (like in Trinity). The SOC is linked through a dual channel to 1 GB of DDR3.
(2GB would have been nice though, I searched on newegg 2GB of DDR3 1600 cost 9.99$, faster ddr3 like 1866 costs 16.99. Trinity in its laptop form has been reviewed mostly with the former so it ain't that bad).

That would have been familiar for the devs , like on the 360 the CPU is a SMP set-up you have 6 hardware threads to play with, on the GPU side more like on the PS3 you to be more careful about the bandwidth.

Instead of EDRAM they would have include a clever power management system like in trinity that may have allowed them to grab some extra performances in what is a pretty power constrained system.

For the ref my laptop use a A8-3500M and has a tdp of 35 watts that with a redwood class GPU running at 444MHz and a CPU running at 1.5GHz it runs games in set-up comparable to nowadays console pretty well. (I mean it's not amazing but once you takes in account all the optimizations going in the console realm the things does more than well).

Overall it would still have extra head room vs the ps360 for the wiimote as I would be such a system performs sightly better than the ps360 combo.

My problem with the WiiU now is that it "may" have a GPU a bit more powerful with a lot more bandwidth but it might not be able to make a difference (pretty much like the difference in RSX and Xenos didn't amount to much ultimately from the average pov).

In favor of my straight SoC you have a simple UMA design with no restriction on the render targets sizes, if you want to go with a 64MB G-Buffer ala Killzone, no problemo. The GPU would have support directx 11 features and be more modern.

Then there is the pretty scary remark with regard to the CPU power.
With 6 cores @1.6 GHz, more cache, and a clever turbo mode I would expect that CPU to out perform Xenon on average.

The worth part is I expect Nintendo solution to be more expansive on every regards, from R&D, the size of the chip, the complexity of the mobo, etc.

I'm not an engineers, I don't think Nintendo engineers suck either but there is definitely something wrong in the decision process at Nintendo HQ.
The usage Nintendo envision for its device and the way they plan to market things is one thing, like for the 3DS sucky hardware is sucky hardware.

You have no solid info on WiiU performance. You're putting a system together and making big assumptions at times based on little to no fact (like chip size/expense ect) and looking at RAM prices on new egg. Now most of that's fine from a purely speculative standpoint (all be it flawed in certain areas, like you're talking about the TDP for mobile parts which are usually binned) . But certainly not when its used to come to the conclusion that there's definitely something wrong with Nintendo's design decisions. I think the very least you should do is wait until you have all the facts before coming to such a certain conclusion.

As far as eDRAM goes I think Nintendo like using it because it helps provide predictable performance, same reason they tend to like low latency memory and big caches.
 
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Also it would have been very easy for him to post under a different name if he wanted to hide his past comments.
Is that true? I thought people were finding it hard getting admittance to GAF and you couldn't just create a second account.
 
I meant he could have registered here with a different name, since he's posting the info here.

Yeah I think its supposed to be quite a process to be accepted at Neogaf these days. Has it now become similar here?
 
Is that true? I thought people were finding it hard getting admittance to GAF and you couldn't just create a second account.

FWIW: I was "accepted" and I can login. Unfortunately, ever since I changed my email address (new ISP), I'm unable to post and unable to contact anyone through my login on the site. I have sent them a few of emails, but haven't received a single reply. It's a shame, really. I'd like to participate in their forums.
 
Remind me if I missed something but back then he was only giving an opinion based on the same info everyone else had. What he's saying about WiiU now is clearly being presented as inside info.

I have no idea if he really has inside info or not, so I'm not taking any of it as anything but rumour. But his opinion on something 6 years ago doesn't convince me he's a fraud. Also it would have been very easy for him to post under a different name if he wanted to hide his past comments.

To put some things in perspective, about 1.5 years ago I had stopped posting on all message boards. In that time frame I went from not posting at all to getting info about all three next gen consoles. So digging up six-year old posts as some kind of proof is asinine to me, but I didn't feel likely continually needing to defend him as people are free to choose what they want to believe.
 
Yeah I think its supposed to be quite a process to be accepted at Neogaf these days. Has it now become similar here?
People are free to join, but we don't have a massive retention on new verbose posters because their quality typically isn't up to snuff. ;)
 
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