Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

Sorry. I used the literal wording in the patent so saying external would be very confusing. Here are pics to show you what I'm talking about.

 

Don't forget the Terminal Comm. Module.

I had felt for awhile now that Wii U would mimic the memory setup of Wii. Wii was technically inferior to the other consoles, but for it to only have 88MB of main/vram memory and 3MB of e1T-SRAM it did some pretty amazing things on its own. The one thing I didn't think would comeback was a return of 1T-SRAM being used similar to the 3MB of GC/Wii. I figured they'd stick to something more like the secondary die on Xenos (and Hollywood). If they are going that route again, I'm interested in seeing how much they use.

EDIT: I know some laughed and/or didn't like my "Cayman Jr" hypothesis, but if the 7000 specs are true then the Lombok is very comparable to my hypothesis.

 

What brings you to this conclusion? Clearly the WiiU casing is considerably larger than a netbook.

 

And clearly, most if not all netbooks don't come CLOSE to 65 watts. Rather "multimedia notebooks" typically have this TDP. My VAIO with an i3 and a 5650 Radeon sits at about 55 watts with just CPU and GPU and that with 15.6''.

 

If two PC configurations I've had ever surprised me with how well they ran Crysis it would be these two:

Asus G52 Laptop:
Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.26 GHz, 3 MB cache
Geforce 9800M GS 512 MB GDDR3 (G94 based, standard 530 MHz/1325 MHz)
2 x 2 GB DDR2-800
Windows Vista x64

Crysis performance notes: System was suited to running Crysis in either DX9 or DX10 at 1280 x 720 at all high settings and no AA. DX9 mode of course gave a bit of a boost of course, but performance kept within the 25-30 FPS range. Performance of this machine configuration was superior to the desktop I had previous with Athlon x2 5600, 2 GB DDR2-1066, and 8800GTS 320 MB. I suspect increase in video memory, GPU TMU increase being the main reason for the superior performance despite small loss in shader throughput, VRAM memory bandwidth, and increased CPU overhead of Windows Vista.

Custom build (Summer 2009):
Athlon II 250 @ 3.0 GHz, 2 x 1 MB cache, socket AM3
Radeon 4670 1 GB DDR3 (750 MHz, 900 MHz memory)
2 x 1 GB DDR3-1333
Windows XP 32

Crysis Performance notes: This system performed a bit better in DX9 than my laptop thanks to much higher GPU clock speeds and despite of loss in VRAM bandwidth.

Yeah, it wouldn't take much to make PC Crysis run quite well these days at 720p. It just needs a healthy dual core, a decent current low-middle end GPU with 512 MB of VRAM, and enough SRAM to make it happy within the confines of the OS. I wonder how a Fusion A8 handles the game.

 

Yeah 65W does seem very high for a netbook, what kind of volume is your VAIO?

 

It's 31 x 370 x 248 mm (or 2844,56cm^3)

 

Revisiting this important part of the article:

Have those who wrote the article heard anything about this lately, or has Nintendo locked everything down?

 

Figured as much. In your opinion do you think they have gotten to that point by now?

 

When you got that bit of info, how far was it between receiving the info and writing/publishing the article?

 

Ok. I'm looking at the Wii timetable as sort of a guide. The Wii launched in November. And an article from IGN stated that the Wii was on it's third version of dev kits in February. A fourth one was to be released soon after at about 90-95 percent the power of the final. And then the final was available by June. That's about five months between the final and launch. So if Nintendo were to follow that same time frame with my belief of a launch not far after E3, then devs would have their final kits by January. Based on that it would mean Nintendo should have a complete GPU by the end of the year. That to me would explain why when you wrote the article late July they still weren't anywhere close to taping out. That was around the time the second Wii U kits went out.

As for the size though I think no internal HDD or PS, and a slim optical drive (I'm expecting) will help with the internal space of the case unless they make changes.

 

lherre is back!

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=32133316&postcount=9649

 

Nintendo recently announced in their Semi-Annual Financial Results Briefing that the final form of the Wii-U will be unvield at E3.

Complete GPU by the end of the year more or less likely? Seems like they only have a few months to polish their already existing titles for the final dev kits.

 

I wonder what they mean by "final format"?

Could changes to the WuPad be incoming? Or maybe a bigger case that allows for a real, man-size heatsink and fan (and higher clocks)?

 

One can dream.

 

Well, maybe Nintendo think that visual splendour like ...



... has hampered the 3DS, and they now want to be able to stand a little better in the market against PS460, in a way that the 3DS can't do against the Neo Geo Pocket 2.

If they moved the CPU/GPU to the side of the BluRay drive (360S style) and put in a 360S style HS&fan cooler they could really crank up the power compared to what they've got in the current case. I can't see Nintendo doing that, but I wouldn't complain if they did ...