Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

Good read, very timely!

 

Are you that pixel counter Mr Strong?

 

Awesome, can't wait until I can read this. Thanks for the heads up Al.

 

On the ED-RAM question: What if the Wii U can use the CPU ED-RAM as the memory target to resolve the frame buffer to? Maybe they simply decided they didn't want to create two separate pools of that memory and the slow downs seen in games like Ghost Recon are because the developers still haven't decided on whether or not to make use of that particular pool for rendering?

 

You're such a bashful one...

Thats the 10 million dollar question isn't it? The first fusion processor to market was an IBM POWER CPU and an AMD GPU, was it not? Do we have any reason to exclude the possibility that the chip will be yet another APU but with even better integration than the Xbox 360 APU which was merely a cost saving move?

 

Excellent article, concise, accurate within the possibilities offered at the time, unparalleled when compared to what has been discussed in forums, technical sites.

 

Decided to actually post here (I registered in 2006) to say how fascinating I found this article. Great read!

 

Great read.

 

Nice article, but, *ahem*, maybe a bit speculative in nature... When it's so hard to find any "meat" on WiiU then the whole article becomes nothing except guesswork. Oh, it'll be an IBM CPU and AMD GPU...and then we extrapolate from there, based on the size of the enclosure shown at E3.

Also two very minor nitpicks: SNES had afaik a total max of on-screen colors of 256, shared between backgrounds and sprites. To exceed that you needed to write new values into color registers on a per-scanline basis, but that's fakery and thus not exceeding the total of 256 unique colors.

Also, the SuperFX was not a DSP coproessor, it was from what I understand a custom RISC CPU (clocked at 12 or 21-ish MHz, with up to 512k RAM available to it I believe.) The SNES had a whole slew of in-cart coprocessors, a bunch of them were third-party creations, like Capcom's C4 for example. Some also were actual DSPs, like the chip powering Nintendo's Pilot Wings.

 

So even in the worst case scenario, WiiU will still have more than enough power to run current console games with some better performance.

To be honest, im more interested in CPU and RAM. GPU will be good in any case.

 

Regarding this bit: Here's an interview with Reggie where he admits that all third party footage was actually from the 360 or ps3. (around the 4:40 mark in the video) So you can't really draw any conclusions from that footage.

 

I'm hoping for eDRAM again. It did wonders for the GC/Wii, and the 360 also of course.

 

I'm missing some discussion re:lithographic process for a GPU that is not yet in à material state, and due to be launched Q2 2012. The article seems to assume the same 40nm process AMD first delivered the HD4770 on in spring 2009. Which is not necessarily a given, and worthy of at least some mention.

 

Fair enough - altthough 28nm being delayed apparently doesn't stop AMD from launching their new lineup on 28nm this year, and makes targetting 40nm for a GPU with the assumed launch date less likely, not more since Nintendo would have had reason to assume the process would be well under control by then.
Can't really comment on the die size vs. wafer cost tradeoff, other than that it should swing in favour of the smaller process with time.

Of course, you may also have some undiscloseable inside info.