Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename
- Thread starter AlNom
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Why do Nintendo fans continue to hold out for some fantasy CPU that is based on the latest Power architecture and greatest lithography technology IBM has to offer?
That is your answer to my question? Or are you ranting about something else??
Turns out, on Nintendo's website, they no longer promote the 45nm, they simply state:
CPU
IBM Power®-based multi-core processor
They also go out of the way to mention the following:
Energy Efficiency:
Wii U utilizes specially designed power-saving features to lower its energy consumption.
Why do Nintendo fans continue to hold out for some fantasy CPU that is based on the latest Power architecture and greatest lithography technology IBM has to offer?
I'm not a nintendo fan, but IBM has outright stated that it's Power7 based
What does 'based' mean? They've also stated outright that it's the same POWER7 chip used in Watson, which it isn't. POWER7 is a 200W chip as far as I can find. How do you get that down to something that'll fit in a 45 W console where the majority of the power budget is spent on the GPU?
With lots of conflicting information, people need to find the resolution of best fit. Which is that it isn't POWER7 but some low-powered PPC, Xenon/Broadway concept. Xenon without the massive vector units but with OoOE.
There would of been plenty of time and hopefully the 3rd party feedback pushed them in that direction but Nintendo make a lot of odd choices when it comes to hardware. Using a 4 year old process node when 32nm is widely available is just insane if the CPU ends up been a major bottleneck.
It would be more likely to be based off of the 40nm devices they already had available in 2009 - that doesn't mean it'll be a full fledged rv740, but there's more to a design than the raw specs/# of units.
Also, if the 32MB eDRAM is on the same die, it's even more likely to be 40nm - 28nm supply and even the availability of 28nm eDRAM at TSMC this year is questionable.
I hope so, but why not using a bit of that extra 1GB of RAM for streaming now that you mention it? Needless to say, developers could also just throw in the virtual memory stuff, like some developers do in certain games.
I think Nintendo have been smart not adding an HDD once and for all. A huge percentage of the HDDs for consoles are total shit, and I mean total shit.
What's the benefit for a console to have one? Not much for gaming.
They are only good for installation purposes and Nintendo giving us the choice to plug our own HDD model to the WiiU is certainly the way to go in the future.
I just hope Sony and MS follow a similar approach, HDD less consoles and allowing us to plug or custom HDDs, so the consoles are not as costly to manufacture and can focus the resources on other way more interesting parts of the system.
I was thinking more along the lines of whether there would be an advantage to using a flash vs a regular HDD in terms of speed.
Flash needs too many dies and a complex controller in order to become truly speedy; too costly for a low-end device like the Wuu. Also, flashdrives' biggest advantage; small block size random accesses don't ever really happen in consoles. Since you don't have multiple programs running doing random I/O the I/O queue depth - if you can even talk in those terms for a console OS - never goes beyond 1...
A SSD would be largely a waste, cost-wise.
A SSD would be largely a waste, cost-wise.
What do you guys think of posts like this on GAF?
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=42211181&postcount=3192
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=42211181&postcount=3192
What do you think of posts that link to pointless GAF posts?
Please go ask other forum members of GAF what they think of the post on their board. Other than that, there's not a single game on Wii U that's been shown so far that looks next gen.
Are you surprised? Considering Wuu is a current-gen system...
(((interference)))
Veteran
So the RAM is confirmed to be 2 GB? That's more than I was expecting.
If they're reserving 1 GB for the OS, perhaps that's them being overly cautious and they'll release memory back to devs once the machine has been out for a while and they figure out a roadmap for the OS and decide what features to include or not.
If they're reserving 1 GB for the OS, perhaps that's them being overly cautious and they'll release memory back to devs once the machine has been out for a while and they figure out a roadmap for the OS and decide what features to include or not.
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2gb, but games can only use 1gb.
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