What IBM CPU is Wii's Broadway a derivative of?

[OtakingGX]

if we assume equal masses for the disk the sheer difference in radii would account for 2.25 power factoring for the full sized-dvd at full spin. factor in the difference in masses (easily more than 3 times) and you end up with > 6 times more power just to spin the medium at a 'cruise' speed. add to the fact that ninty will hardly allow drastucally longer times for spinning up of a game disk, and you may easily end up with 10+ times the power just for the spinning (nominal or extrema - the psu must accomodate for all cases regardless). and don't forget the longer reading-head journies either (greater momentum, etc). so as a totally gross off-the-top-of-my-hat generalization, we may be looking at anything inbetween 10 to 15 times power factoring for the mechanics alone.

i have no clue what the laser's consumption might be, so i'll leave it at your judgement, but you're seriously underestimating the mechanical power increase dut to the bigger medium, IMO.

I accounted for the masses. Since a DVD is the same thickness throughout, I considered mass to be a function of area. The area of an 8 cm disc is about half that of a 12 cm disc, so the mass would be half. Apparently I can't do math though. The moment of inertia of a large disc would be 35 kg-mm^2 and the small disc would be 7 kg-mm^2, when I said they were 36 and 5.

It's a linear relationship to get from moment of inertia to power (assuming rotational acceleration is equal), so we can say that the larger disc takes 5 times more power to accelerate. You assume that the mass is three times as much. Mass is also dependent on the square of the radius. So the easy calculation would be: 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 = 5.1.

I would consider the larger disc to have an advantage as far as moving the read laser goes. Since data is packed more densely at the edge of the disc the laser would not have to move as far between reads. There shouldn't be a greater momentum on the laser unless it has more mass or it is moving faster.

This discussion might be moot, since I found this page. Power consumption of a DVD drive appears to be 4.5W at spin up, and 2.5W under steady operation. Even with a 5W power budget for the DVD drive, that still leaves quite a bit of power for the rest of the system and a GPU that's supposedly clocked at 243 MHz. That's Radeon 9550 territory there. I'm certain that the 9550 draws less than 20W, considering that the 9600 Pro (same core, 150 MHz faster) draws about 18W on 130nm.

I still maintain that given the specs we've been told that Wii should come nowhere near 50W. Even in spite of a full sized DVD drive, extra memory, and wifi the power budget for the console shouldn't be as high as Iwata stated. So either he was wrong, or the specs that we've learned so far are misleading.

 

[Fox5]

You mean, "It's not like any consoles until xbox were successfully marketed to PC gamers as offering a similar experience." After all, I don't remember Commander Keen 2 exactly blowing away Super Mario Bros 3 or Sonic the Hedgehog with its amazing graphics and smooth scrolling. And you're probably the the first person I've heard who complained about consoles not having good "scope of games." I thought PSx, PS2, SNES, and NES each had hundreds upon hundreds of available games encompassing a vast wealth of genres and were the platforms on which a number of popular genres were born. I guess I was wrong. Unless by "scope of games," you mean "version of Doom."

Quite to the contrary, Wii is one of the few home consoles in history that will simply not be capable of providing games with a graphical experience comparable to what the average PC gamer will see when playing a typical PC release.

I was referring more to open ended RPGs, moderately complex simlike games, and fast paced twitch shooters that didn't really hit the console until Xbox came out.
Personally, I see games such as Morrowind, Fable, and Splinter Cell as being incapable on the previous gen of consoles, or at least no devs tried to shoehorn that type of open ended gameplay into consoles prior. (ok, fable is a bad example as it doesn't do much that zelda didn't, but I think morrowind and splinter cell stand as good examples) The kind of games that you'd see on the cover on PC gamer, and then they'd go on to have abyssmal sales as people went on to buy the newest Doom or Quake.

 

[OtakingGX]

I was referring more to open ended RPGs, moderately complex simlike games, and fast paced twitch shooters that didn't really hit the console until Xbox came out.
Personally, I see games such as Morrowind, Fable, and Splinter Cell as being incapable on the previous gen of consoles, or at least no devs tried to shoehorn that type of open ended gameplay into consoles prior. (ok, fable is a bad example as it doesn't do much that zelda didn't, but I think morrowind and splinter cell stand as good examples) The kind of games that you'd see on the cover on PC gamer, and then they'd go on to have abyssmal sales as people went on to buy the newest Doom or Quake.

I've played Metal Gear Solid on PS2. I've played Splinter Cell on PC. I don't see that Splinter Cell had greatly different gameplay than what we've had on consoles since the PSX. Morrowind was a new experience on consoles (I played it on PC, I don't know how it was on Xbox). And I'd argue that Halo is not a fast paced twitch shooter. And judging by the popularity of Goldeneye, Xbox did not pioneer the genre on consoles.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I was referring more to open ended RPGs, moderately complex simlike games

I've got Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Sim City, and Populous for my SNES. As far as open-ended RPGs, you're right, there was nothing like Ultima or Fallout in the console space. And with the lone exception of Morrowind, that genre was pretty much dead last generation. It hasn't exactly transferred well to the console space.

and fast paced twitch shooters that didn't really hit the console until Xbox came out.

I thought it was more like once the Xbox came out, PC shooters became a lot slower and less twitchy so that they could be marketed on the console space. But regardless, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament hit the Dreamcast before the Xbox ever came out, and the twitchiest console FPS I've ever played was Timesplitters 2, not Halo.

Splinter Cell

This is a singularly odd inclusion. Metal Gear Solid was the first successful action-stealth game I know of (and debuted on PS1, not PC), and the only thing that makes Splinter Cell truly unique was that it used the advanced lighting capabilities of hardware in the T&L age, not anything particularly unique about PCs until the Xbox came along. It wasn't going to happen on the N64, but it wasn't going to happen on a Virge-equipped 486, either. I guess you could bring up Thief, but the fact is there weren't really any more such games on PC as there were on PS.

 

[StefanS]

This is a singularly odd inclusion. Metal Gear Solid was the first successful action-stealth game I know of (and debuted on PS1, not PC), and the only thing that makes Splinter Cell truly unique was that it used the advanced lighting capabilities of hardware in the T&L age, not anything particularly unique about PCs until the Xbox came along.

But wasn't Thief (PC) released earlier?

 

[fearsomepirate]

MGS hit shelves in October 1998, and Thief was December.

 

[Fox5]

I've played Metal Gear Solid on PS2. I've played Splinter Cell on PC. I don't see that Splinter Cell had greatly different gameplay than what we've had on consoles since the PSX. Morrowind was a new experience on consoles (I played it on PC, I don't know how it was on Xbox). And I'd argue that Halo is not a fast paced twitch shooter. And judging by the popularity of Goldeneye, Xbox did not pioneer the genre on consoles.

Oh come on, Halo wasn't the only FPS released on this gen of consoles.

This is a singularly odd inclusion. Metal Gear Solid was the first successful action-stealth game I know of (and debuted on PS1, not PC), and the only thing that makes Splinter Cell truly unique was that it used the advanced lighting capabilities of hardware in the T&L age, not anything particularly unique about PCs until the Xbox came along. It wasn't going to happen on the N64, but it wasn't going to happen on a Virge-equipped 486, either. I guess you could bring up Thief, but the fact is there weren't really any more such games on PC as there were on PS.

IMO, MGS had a rather dumbed down game experience, in thief you actually had to not be seen or heard and could do more steathly things than in MGS. Not that MGS wasn't a unique experience, but thief did more. (plus, MGS's gameplay was mostly the same as Metal Gear on the MSX, it was 2d gameplay with 3d graphics)

MGS hit shelves in October 1998, and Thief was December.

Really, I always thought Thief was a 1997 release. It does appear it was actually a late 1998 release though.

Ok, this is seriously off-topic.