Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

[function]

We don't actually know anything but the RAM amount from Wii U, everything else is just more or less reasonable assumptions based on rumours and physical appearance of the chips.

As The Lump says we know it's speed, and that it has three cores, and that it's made on a dated 45nm process. We can also be certain that its power draw is very low.

We also know for sure what at least one lead programmer really think about it.

We also know that size matters only to some extent, smaller chip can in fact be faster than bigger chip and of course vice versa.

There's a strong positive correlation between transistor count and performance (particularly on the same process node), and power consumption and performance (given the same process node and similar transistor counts).

All the indicators suggest the Wii U does not have a powerful processor, unless the Wii U is packing something that make an ULV Ivy Bridge processor look like a power and silicon hog.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

But I wonder how many ported games took advantage of the DSP?
If they didnt, it tells me the CPU is at least on par with current gen.
And when future games take advantage of the DSP, the CPU can work on
more tasks.

It shouldn't tell you that.
First, I don't know why you think the DSP isn't being used. Maybe the developers out there know this better, but most probably you can't even enable an audio engine without using the DSP. The audio libraries available in the dev kit will just enable the DSP regardless of your implementation.

Second, you're overestimating the burden of a surround sound software solution in a CPU.
To give you an idea, the EMU10K2 DSP in the Soundblaster Audigy 2 line (and I really doubt the Wii U's audio DSP is as powerful as an EMU10K2) does something like 450 MIPS. That's what a single PowerPC 750 core can do @ 200MHz.

So even if the sound was being processed solely by software on the Wii U's CPU, it would only be taking less than 1/6th of a single core.
Count the three cores and you reach the conclusion that, if the sound really was being processed by the Wii U's CPU and it's doing as much as an EMU10K2 at full throughput (that's 64 simultaneous voices with effects and multiple environments), it's using as much as 6% of the "Espresso" power.
And I'm not even counting with additional instructions that probably are in Espresso that accelerate multimedia.

There's a reason why no one does hardware sound anymore. It's because the burden on current CPUs is almost negligible.

And isnt there a point, with games, in relation to budget and target resolution,
were the CPU is good enough?
Meaning, switching a modern CPU with an older one, does not have that
much of an effect if you have a modern GPU running your game?

Try clocking a modern CPU to ~800MHz and see what happens to your PC games.

Going back to the Lego game, I understand the draw distance is pretty
impressive. Would not a weak CPU be a bottleneck in that regard?

No, it wouldn't. AFAIK, a weak CPU would make a difference if you have lots of independently moving objects and lots of AIs. For example, GTA 4 may be impossible to do on the Wii U.

 

[function]

About the only places you'd see a weak CPU exposed are physics effects, and places with a lot of characters.

Which are exactly the kind of places we've seen the WiiU chugging away ...

I hope this won't lead to a new even lower bar being set for multiplatform games. At this point in the generation - as the PS360 are creaking towards retirement - the last thing we need is for environments to become even more sparsely populated by even dumber AIs with even less physical environmental interaction going on.

 

[Exophase]

For those interested in the DSP and how it's used on Gamecube and Wii a Dolphin developer produced an excellent writeup recently:

http://blog.lse.epita.fr/articles/38-emulating-the-gamecube-audio-processing-in-dolphin.html

As you can see there were only a tiny number of programs for this DSP, all generated by Nintendo, so it's used more like the ARM7 in DS than as a general purpose processor. So games wouldn't be thinking about porting stuff to it, and they're probably all getting loaded with code by whatever libraries/SDK Nintendo has for Wii U. It's still an open question of how well this provided functionality is actually used but none of it is very heavy lifting so I doubt it makes a huge difference. The DSP is afterall just 81MHz 16-bit processor with 40-bit integer MACs, and some small memories. Since it's hard to keep 3 cores 100% utilized anyway squeezing that amount of performance for audio isn't a big deal.

Nintendo probably included the DSP to better standardize functionality by providing to the developer what are essentially fixed hardware functions without getting in the way of their code base. It also may make more sense from a hardware point of view - Gamecube/Wii dedicate a pool of RAM to the DSP and there are interfaces that go through the DSP and need DSP code to access, like stuff with the Wiimote. Chucking a bunch of peripheral stuff off to a simpler dedicated coprocessor can make things easier to design and lay out (main CPU no longer needs nearly as many interfaces). But none of this is really a big performance advantage for developers.

 

[eastmen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3bYsSuCUok

watching this its obvious that the wi u is a powerfull system. Yes the 360 has the better framerate , but this is the 3rd game based on this series for the xbox 360 , the xbox 360 is the lead sku and the engine this game is based on has been tweaked over hundreds of games including major platform exclusives like gears of war for the xbox 360.

Let the performance falls between the xbox 360 and the ps3 with it matching the 360 in a lot of places.



I mean remember what first gen games looked like on the xbox 360

http://youtu.be/iMSEpdVOhqs?t=3m3s

People would complain that it was xbox 1.5 and such nonsense .

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Almost running as well as a SEVEN YEAR OLD SYSTEM is powerful???

This thread has self destructed.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

watching this its obvious that the wi u is a powerfull system.

That's a very relative term. I don't think anyone considers PS360 powerful by modern tech standards. I expect Wuu to be producing better visuals than either once devs have learnt the ropes, but it's far from 'powerful' as a reference point. It is 'more powerful' probably overall, in graphics terms (bandwidth is still a huge question mark), but it is not 'powerful' by a modern tech POV or a likely next-gen XB or PS target.

But calling Wii U powerful or not doesn't help determine the actual silicon components either, so it's pretty OT.

 

[MDX]

GTA 4 may be impossible to do on the Wii U.

Hold the fort... shots have been fired, the line in the sand has been drawn, and the gauntlet has been thrown down...

So, we should not be seeing in the lifetime of the WiiU a game like GTA4.
How can this be measured, considering we may never see a GTA game on the console.

 

[Kaotik]

Almost running as well as a SEVEN YEAR OLD SYSTEM is powerful???

It all depends if all the dev wanted to do is "get it running on the Wii U and be happy about it", which I personally believe to be the case for all multiplatform releases on Wii U so far, or if they actually took serious amounts of time and resources to optimize the game for it.

Do people really assume the Wii U version of any of the multiplatforms has been given even remotely same amount of work as PS360 versions of the said game, even if we ignore all the work the devs had already done before starting on that particular game (engine optimizations for said platform etc)?

 

[Karamazov]

some xbox360 launch games were not way above xbox last games, but some were clearly superior (PGR3). Not a single wii u game released so far is clearly superior to the best ps360 games, only on par at best. And that's the first time it's happening, there is nothing that shows that the wii u, at the moment, has a clear power advantage. It's even worse considering that the ps360 gen is the gen that lasted the longest time (7 years !).
the 360 released only 4 years after the xbox.

 

[NRP]

This thread has self destructed.

The Tags for this thread are hilarious! Whoever wrote them deserves a gold star.

 

[max-pain]

some xbox360 launch games were not way above xbox last games

All Xbox 360 games were way above in resolution.

 

[MDX]

some xbox360 launch games were not way above xbox last games, but some were clearly superior (PGR3). Not a single wii u game released so far is clearly superior to the best ps360 games, only on par at best. And that's the first time it's happening, there is nothing that shows that the wii u, at the moment, has a clear power advantage. It's even worse considering that the ps360 gen is the gen that lasted the longest time (7 years !).
the 360 released only 4 years after the xbox.

But why is this a surprise?
Did you forget what these machines cost and cost the players?
Did you forget that these machines jumped a generation?
And were planned to be active for 10 years, and not because of their popularity?
Doing so, they left Nintendo in the dust, when Nintendo took a normal leap in console
power. They basically have done the same again, which brings them at least on par starting off, and surpassing them down the road. But not with the dramatic differences we see going from SD to HD.

The console makers, Sony and MS, took a big gamble on HD gaming. It took them 6 to 7 years to recover from it. 6 to 7 years to reach 70 million units. This has not been a normal console generation.

You can bet that Nintendo will not need 6 to 7 years to make money off their first HD console.

 

[MDX]

All Xbox 360 games were way above in resolution.

Xbox had some 720p games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games_with_HD_support

 

[XpiderMX]

Xbox had some 720p games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games_with_HD_support

And? The Xbox versions of multiplatform games (Xbox-Xbox 360) are not 720p.

 

[eastmen]

Almost running as well as a SEVEN YEAR OLD SYSTEM is powerful???

This thread has self destructed.

The 7 year old consoles are still selling for $200 + while the wii u sells for $300 . In the end I don't care how old a system is , I care about how the games look and play.

That's a very relative term. I don't think anyone considers PS360 powerful by modern tech standards. I expect Wuu to be producing better visuals than either once devs have learnt the ropes, but it's far from 'powerful' as a reference point. It is 'more powerful' probably overall, in graphics terms (bandwidth is still a huge question mark), but it is not 'powerful' by a modern tech POV or a likely next-gen XB or PS target.

But calling Wii U powerful or not doesn't help determine the actual silicon components either, so it's pretty OT.

I think it will produce graphics beyond what the ps360 can do . I wouldn't be surprised if second gen wii u games are close to the launch title quality of the next sony/ms stuff

 

[lwill]

It takes time to port an engine to a new machine, even longer if the machine is significantly different.
I'm talking about writing code that runs very well on the new machine taking advantage of its capabilities, not just changing a few API calls and using a different compiler.

It's way too early to guess how powerful the Wii U really is w/o a DevKit, and even then, there's some research to be done before finding the sweet spot.
It took years for the PS3 & 360 to get the games they have today, and engines that work well on both of them.

Don't try to look more than you can in early games of a new system, they are rarely (if ever) representative.

I agree. Good post, Roderic.

some xbox360 launch games were not way above xbox last games, but some were clearly superior (PGR3). Not a single wii u game released so far is clearly superior to the best ps360 games, only on par at best. And that's the first time it's happening, there is nothing that shows that the wii u, at the moment, has a clear power advantage. It's even worse considering that the ps360 gen is the gen that lasted the longest time (7 years !).

the 360 released only 4 years after the xbox.

The longer generation can be used for both sides of that argument. While it is true that the 360 is older-tech, developers had over 7 years of experience with the hardware. Devs had learned alot of tricks and methods on current-gen consoles so that they can make games with impressive graphics like Halo 4 and Last of Us. The original Xbox, on the other hand, probably didn't get the time in its generation to get as close to being "maxed-out" as the current-gen consoles are at this time.

 

[artstyledev]

"Its a 750 no way around it. Nothing else comes close. The question is WHAT 750. IBM publically terminated the series in 2006, because of its inability to get the chip multicore and/or clocked higher. Pressure was high from apple for a successor to the excellent g3 (ppc 750's commercial computer cpu, the powermac g3). So IBM abandoned the family at the last minute for a deeply piped architecture that could reach clock speeds up to 1 Ghz and beyond and support smp to meet apples demands.

The chip was garbage, had horrible yields, lousy gp with only fairly strong fp saving it was a public disaster for apple.

Ibm would later release an improved g3 cpu (the 750), which, at a single core at 750mhz outperformed dual core g4's in excess of 1Ghz. Apple was not happy.

IBM's last chance to keep apple was in 2004/5. Still unable to gain smp support or clock speeds with the 750 family for the g5, IBM publically announced the family was a dead end and shelved it. They went with die shrink and general fixer upper of the g4 clocked up to 3 Ghz. It suffered all the same problems as the g4. Apple ended the contract with ibm over the g5 in 2006, in favour of a contract with intel, resulting in the icore line.

xenon and cell are both modified g5's.

Anyone who says broadway ANYTHING without bringing these facts up is simply throwing crap against the wall.

Sometimes crap sticks.

The problem with guessing a 750 with the facts we had is, its doing 2 impossible things for the 750 family. It has smp support, which no 750 ever had ever, its inability to support multicore was one of the reasons the series was terminated in 2006 (another reason it 'couldnt' have been a 750, the series was publically terminated in 2006, and never made on a process smaller than 90nm) the other reason is because the family couldnt be clocked higher than 1ghz, at a time when 3-4 Ghz was what was demanded. Wii u cpu is clocked at 1.25 Ghz, higher than any 750 in existance... The reason why is because its fabbed on a 45nm process, which is 'impossible' because the family was publically terminated before it ever got below 90nm.

The fact that ibm was still attempting to do something with its last good architecture it publically said it terminated wasnt known until we found out it was still making specialty 750's for select clients, when one such client announced they needed to take one to mars. Now we know there are years of undocumented entries into the 750 line."

Thoughts?

 

[function]

xenon and cell are both modified g5's.

lol wut?

Where did you get this?

 

[DoctorFouad]

I think it will produce graphics beyond what the ps360 can do . I wouldn't be surprised if second gen wii u games are close to the launch title quality of the next sony/ms stuff

No comment

I wouldnt be surprised if WiiU second gen titles would struggle to achieve Last of Us level of graphics...but a next gen naughty dog game ?