Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

Yes I can see that on the PS3 Cell assists in many tasks and I did neglect it a little bit. I just think that when he said "hybrid solutions" on other consoles in plural, that the "hybrid solutions" part was not meant to be a term defining the hardware (a hybrid system) or a combination of GPU+CPU (hardware+ different hardware), but a hybrid solution of not fully featured hardware (whatever combination of chips) + coding tricks to create a similar graphical end result on the other consoles, which is less efficient than what the WiiU can do with it's more fully featured hardware.

I'm sorry if ^ reads like a complete mess, it could be BS.

 

So the Amazon Kindle and the WiiU are similar in power and features, if I understand you correctly? Secondly, from a business standpoint, I dont know how you can say the WiiU costs too much when their presales are pretty good.

 

Huh where did I mention the Kindle? Presales don't really mean anything, there are always the die hard fans that will buy a new console at almost any price.

 

If you're paying €350 you're being ripped off! It can be had for €299 in most places

The problem alot of people are having is that they're yet again comparing it to other consoles**. Nintnedo is openly not trying to compete with them and they are after their own niche. iPad is underpowered compared to an xbox 360, but thats not stopping me buying one, and thats how I consider WiiU. Its its own thing and its powerful enough for what it needs to do. The added bonus is that its likely got all the features it needs to receive downports for the other two super-consoles once they come out.

And just because the processor is struggling with some aspects of code designed for older processors, doesn't mean its weaker or 'slower'. As others have pointed out, a Pentium 4 can be more capable at some operations than an i5.....but I'm not going to complain that my i5 is underpowered because of that.

Technology advances but software has to advance along with it....


**Edit: Which is understandable

 

The WiiU enjoys strong presales because it ticks all the boxes:
* It's the new shiny.
* It's backwards compatible with the Wii catalog and peripherals.
* It brings something new to the table in terms of game design.
* It promises a better way of dealing with old issues regarding maps, inventories and similar
* It promises to be the most powerful home console for a year or so.
* It comes at a carefully calculated price, that doesn't break the bank for a large number of potential early customers
* It allows gaming away from the TV but with the muscle of a stationary console.

The vast majority of complains about the console boils down to wanting the power draw under load to be 150W rather than 40-45W, with the associated increases in performance, size, cost, and realistically noise.
Fair enough, but I'd definitely hesitate to say that this would have been a better compromise for the market as a whole.

For what we know, the console seems to have a sensible architecture. The Tekken fellow who was rather open about the CPU issues, also specifically mentioned the SPEs of Cell, and it would seem that the CPU has dropped the SP floating point capabilities of mainly Cell, but also the 360 if you manage to stay in L1. Instead, they spend those resources on the GPU which has also been clearly stated to be more capable than the PS360 ones. Which for a game console, released in this day and age, seems reasonable. Let me quote sebbbi in this thread.

What he is basically saying here is that you get better utilization of spent gates/power/money if you spend it on GPU FLOPS than on CPU flops once the CPU single threaded needs are taken care of. (Please excuse me sebbbi if this is a misinterpretation of your position.) This rebalancing of resources vs PS360 causes some issues with direct ports, obviously, but seems like a good idea going forward. I would be very surprised indeed to see a Cell-RSX or even Xenos-Xenon resource balance from any of the new consoles.

The processing power of the WiiU seems to be a direct consequence of the power/cost envelope that Nintendo has decided, and the timing of their release (which largely determines process node). I'm not sure they have done a bad job given their chosen constraints

 

Well one has to aknowledge then that Nintendo has a very large number of die-hard fans.

I know you didnt mention Kindle, but you stated the WiiU should have been priced at $200. A Kindle DX will set you back $299. Im just wondering, based on what hardware metric do you think that the WiiU cannot compete with a Kindle? Does it, the Kindle DX, have a more advanced GPU or CPU then the WiiU? Does it sport a color screen? Can it even play games and offer the services that WiiU will?

 

That could be a huge problem for Nintendo if enough people feel that the machine is underpowered and not future proof. I could care less what Nintendo intends to do for the machine if it's not worth the price I'm paying for it. It's not a problem with a lot of people comparing the machine to others, it is Nintendo's problem for them to deal with. They plan on launching a current gen machine as a next gen machine and that's just plain retarded. Nintendo's fear of directly competing with Sony and Microsoft may end up biting them in the ass in a really bad way. The WiiU could send them software only, which I think would be beneficial to the industry if they continue to ignore market dynamics and go their own way. They can do both, cater to their niche and the mainstream, why they have decided not to is beyond me.

 

sums up my thoughts, and the little recognized underlying dynamic that graphics drive this industry, well.

i'm not sure what nintendo does after what is in my view the completely inevitable and horrific failure of the wii u.

launch another console, 2-3 years after ps4/720, that is traditional and actually outpowers those (should be cheaper in that time frame)? Somehow it feels like Nintendo would rather die than do this.

Or, try to come up with another "gimmick". And what could that be?

I think, a console based on something like Oculus Rift could be the next frontier to try. Not saying it'll be Nintendo. And there's still the issue of, including an expensive headset takes away all your hardware power budget. But somebody like Nintendo might be able to pull it off, similar to how people accepted the Wii cause it had Nintendo stamped on the side (imo). It also doesn't fit their IP so well, but I guess I could see HMD Mario lol.

 

Launching 2-3 years after others would be like launching 2 years after the PS2. Wii U is their only shot

Nintendo needs to start making money soon on hardware products.. cause they havent since the last hardware launch. It just dosent make sense. They would easily be the most profitable publisher in the world without HW losses

 

This is turning into the WiiU marketplace thread rather than WiiU GPU/tech.
Little new info and imminent launch makes this inevitable to some extent, but...
We need to get tech nuggets regarding eDRAM presence/size and main memory configuration to get much further. Personally I would like some info on how the CPU and GPU interface, but that's probably too specific for anything but a tech doc leak.

 

On that note Entropy, I think it is time to post some of my observations/speculation on the Wii GPU.

First off, I'm going to assume that the GPU is fab'ed on TSMC's 40nm process, because it should be quite mature by now and not in as high of a demand. Now if we look at Barts, we can see it has nearly the same area versus R770, (the chip GPU is rumored to be based on, and the same chip that powered the early dev kits, RV770 LE, if I'm not mistaken.) Namely, 255mm^2 (Barts) vs 256mm^2 (R770). Barts has 77.8% more transistors as well. Let's round that to 78% transistors to account for the 1mm^2 area difference. So, in theory, and assuming my math isn't completely off, AMD should be able to pack 78% more transistors into the same area chip.

Now if we consider that Flipper was 106 mm^2, lets assume again that Nin. is shooting for a chip that is 120mm^2 or under, including eDRAM. (That 106mm^2 figure did include Flipper's 3MB of eDRAM, but not the 24MB 1T-SRAM, which I would say equates to the 2GB of main RAM in the Wii U). Using that 78% figure, at 40nm Wii GPU could be ~752 million transistors and be 120mm^2 on the nose.

eDRAM should be 1 transistor-per-bit, just like most/(all?) DRAM, plus some extra misc. transistors. So, say, 280-300 million transistors for 32MB of eDRAM alone. This leaves you with ~462 million transistors for the GPU. (This came from the average of 280 and 300, subtracted from the total of 752)

Looking at the transistor count for other AMD GPUs, I would guess the GPU would look like this.

Frontend:
4 SIMDs
40 ALUs, arranged into 8 VLIW5 pipelines per SIMD
4 TU per SIMD
16KB L1 Texture Cache per SIMD
16KB Local Data Share
16KB Global Data Share

Backend:
16 ROPs (Minus hardware MSAA resolve)

Basically, each SIMD would the same as RV770, but with half the ALUs. The ROPs would hale more from R670 than RV7xx, in an attempt to have more ROPs at the expense of reverting back to software MSAA resolve. (This is my attempt to account for the fact that there is 32MB of eDRAM onboard, yet without any footage of any game using MSAA)

I guessed smaller, yet more SIMDs because this is supposed to be a more GPGPU-centric design. We saw Cayman perform better than Cypress in compute functions with less ALUs, but more total SIMDs, so I figure a similar approach may work here as well.

There is a lot of speculation and assumptions in this post, so I ask anyone with accurate specifics to point these out. To those more knowledgeable than I, does this seem reasonable? Is my math and approximations correct/reasonable?

 

This is a coincidence and not relevant to Wii U speculation, but I figure some of you might be interested to know rv730 was code named Mario and rv710 was Luigi. The code names probably leaked out when the chips launched, but I'm sure most don't remember them.

 

Check this out:

Iwata asks: WiiU

http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/console/0/0

 

Nintendo: saving energy since 1889. Its a great PR spin

 

So this is it:



Two LSIs on a single MCM. The big one is obviously the GPU, the small one on the left is the CPU.


As the size is really hard to guess without any frame of reference:

 

Well, theres the two dies, anyone estimated the size based on the 4 RAM chips? I'd eyeball guess the CPU is 40-ish mm^2 and the GPU is 150 ish mm^2.

 

Wow, I wasn't expecting this I mean pictures of the board and the dies.