Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

Interesting.
My little idea : there aren't really two pools nor different memory, but say there are two 64bit or 32bit ddr3 controllers.
All data is interleaved on all chips (because it's how you get high bandwith). but when going stand by, all game data is discarded ("hibernated" on flash if you need it) ; all OS data that resided on memory chips 2 and 3 get copied to chips 0 and 1.
You can now deactivate one of the controllers and half the memory chips. Then stand-by function can be serviced by one underclocked PowerPC core. Memory can be slowed down and undervolted as well.

This could explain the plain 1GB + 1GB split, say the memory is cut in 4KB pages or byte blocks, "O" stands for OS and "G" stands for game data :

Code:

chip 0 | chip 1 | chip 2 | chip 3
-------+--------+--------+-------
  O1   |   G1   |   O2   |   G2   
  G3   |   O3   |   G4   |   O4

etc. (if that scheme makes sense)

copy stuff around and spin down, so to speak :

Code:

chip 0 | chip 1 
-------+-------
  O1   |   O2   
  O4   |   O3

(switch O3 and O4 during the copy if you feel it doesn't look good)

 

Perspective.

 

Interesting idea, although the 50/50 RAM split wouldn't favour this system. eg. In the case of 75% used for game and 25% for OS, the same game content could be copied out and the OS stuff migrated to two chips. As long as the OS can fit into two chips, your plan could be supported, placing an upper limit of 1GB on the OS, but no upper limit on game size.

 

Yeah, thats what I thought.

The chips on the top are more square and larger in width than the ones on the side.
Perspective should have made them more rectangular and shorter because of the tilt and distance. But they are not.

However, looking at it again, I forgot that the chips on top are also not flat on the board, and what I can be calculating in could be their height... the compression of the photo doesn't help. Well maybe its safer to assume all four are the same size after all.

Anyway, now you are assuming the four chips each are 512MB of DDR3?
So you think there is no substantial amount of RAM on the MCM itself?

 

Nothing really revolutionary or anything revealed here, but better than nothing:

Wuublet video screen latency 1/60th of a second, says Rayman developer.

 

The eDRAM would be enough for that and much more energy efficient I guess.

 

It only looks like that in this small picture:




When you zoom in the illusion disappears!! You can still zoom more in the link by pressing the magnifying glass
http://www.aijaa.com/DQ40J5

I tried to crop the chips with paint. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.
http://aijaa.com/Lj2Tf3

The chips are identical.

 

Yeah part of the problem was that someone on GAF used photoshop to try and fix the perspective - but it ended up scewing the shape of the RAM chips. Alot of people saw that picture and thought it was the original (myself included) and in that altered pic they are obviously different shapes. In the original pic however, as shown above, they are clearly the same chips.

 

I wonder how much money will AMD make by selling/licensing this GPU design for nintendo?

I'm asking that because of the strong news about the bad financial state of AMD, and consoles could play a important role for them...

 

ATi has always been fine, AMD on the other hand, has had ups and downs, and more downs than ups these years.

 

Im still curious to Renesas's role with the WiiU MCM.
Ive been stating that they might be supplying the RAM, based on an article I read.
But what if they are supplying the DSP?

Maybe something like this:

.

 

The SH-4 was the CPU of the dreamcast.

 

Renesas still has fabs and they know a thing or two about eDRAM - my guess is they manufacture the GPU.

 

True, but the SH-4 is not the same as the SH-4A as far as I can see.

 

A lot of tweaks but I don't know if it's major things or not :

http://documentation.renesas.com/doc/products/mpumcu/rej09b0003_sh4a.pdf

1.2 Changes from SH-4 to SH-4A

 

So what of those AMD emails regarding the GPU being an e6760?
There were three of them. One from a spaniard forum, one from gaf, and one from gbatemp.
Either they were all fake and the second two just copied the original, or AMD tech support was saying things it wasn't supposed to.

Either way, does Iwata's teardown of the console shed any light on things

 

Simply put, fakes.

 

How about complicatedly put?

 

Complicated.

There's zero chance of some tech support guy being read into a hardware contract with a third party for a couple of reasons. First the specs of these things are meant to be secret so they just don't tell everyone, secondly AMD doesn't provide tech support for consoles even if they contain their hardware.

So if the email is real (really from AMD and not a fabrication) It was just some guy who doesn't have a clue replying anyway.

 

They weren't fake, I tried it myself and got a similar response (also posted it on gaf)

But you're right, theres no reason at all to believe a customer services rep from AMD would have any information on the innards of the WiiU. I'm not sure why they said what they said, but I'm sure it wasn't based on any facts.


However, I also beleive that that will be the GPU which is most similar to GPU7 (wii u GPU) in terms of power/watt ratio and features when all is said and done. Just imho.