Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

[Li Mu Bai]

An ARM9 wouldn't be able to send video+sound streams to the tablet controllers, so it's pretty obvious that either Nintendo leaves that for the main CPU or they'll have to significantly upgrade the fuctionality/performance in Starlet 2.

There's the Marvell's president claim in 2010 that there were significant shipments of Armada XP units going to "a new gaming platform" and there's the claim that people at AMD have been calling the Wii U's GPU as a System-on-Chip, which suggests it has an integrated application processor of some kind.

Check out page 22 on this very same thread.

ARM is completely out of the equation, the Wii U's dedicated DSP should effectively work in tandem with the central processor making the audio footprint a veritable non-issue. (streaming to the subscreen) However some ARM components will be there that allow you to use social networking/browse the internet without turning the main CPU/GPU on, or perhaps impacting a paused gaming session. Similar to what is seen in the 3DS, a standby network processor functionality. Btw bgassasin, tell those maniacs in the in Gaf thread that Retro is definitely not working a next-gen DK. They are aggressively targeting the XBOX/PS3 demographic.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

ARM is completely out of the equation, the Wii U's dedicated DSP should effectively work in tandem with the central processor making the audio footprint a veritable non-issue. (streaming to the subscreen) However some ARM components will be there that allow you to use social networking/browse the internet without turning the main CPU/GPU on, or perhaps impacting a paused gaming session. Similar to what is seen in the 3DS, a standby network processor functionality. Btw bgassasin, tell those maniacs in the in Gaf thread that Retro is definitely not working a next-gen DK. They are aggressively targeting the XBOX/PS3 demographic.

What do you mean with "ARM"? How come there'll be "ARM components" but no applications processor?

 

[bgassassin]

What do you mean with "ARM"? How come there'll be "ARM components" but no applications processor?

Good questions. I'm kind of befuddled at how that works as well. From what I understood, there would be an ARM core for I/O purposes like Starlet.

 

[Li Mu Bai]

Good questions. I'm kind of befuddled at how that works as well. From what I understood, there would be an ARM core for I/O purposes like Starlet.

My apologies gentlemen, (got distracted at work) I meant specifically the ARM9 line of component processors was out of the "equation". Nintendo and ARM have indeed grown quite close as business partners, they will again be providing an applications processor core. A proprietary solution specifically for Nintendo. Marvell will not, as it is not SOC. I referenced Retro bgassassin because their project is for the "broader" demographic. It is not DK, LOZ, nor MP. It is extremely visually impressive, or so I am told. And I love those maniacs, back in my younger days I established the MC threads. Along with CVX, iirc.

 

[Earendil]

My apologies gentlemen, (got distracted at work) I meant specifically the ARM9 line of component processors was out of the "equation". Nintendo and ARM have indeed grown quite close as business partners, they will again be providing an applications processor core. A proprietary solution specifically for Nintendo. Marvell will not, as it is not SOC. I referenced Retro bgassassin because their project is for the "broader" demographic. It is not DK, LOZ, nor MP. It is extremely visually impressive, or so I am told. And I love those maniacs, back in my younger days I established the MC threads. Along with CVX, iirc.

You're such a tease... and for some reason I love it!

 

[bgassassin]

My apologies gentlemen, (got distracted at work) I meant specifically the ARM9 line of component processors was out of the "equation". Nintendo and ARM have indeed grown quite close as business partners, they will again be providing an applications processor core. A proprietary solution specifically for Nintendo. Marvell will not, as it is not SOC. I referenced Retro bgassassin because their project is for the "broader" demographic. It is not DK, LOZ, nor MP. It is extremely visually impressive, or so I am told. And I love those maniacs, back in my younger days I established the MC threads. Along with CVX, iirc.

You've been around for a minute then.

And look at what you've done. Your two posts have spurred around 300 posts on this.

Thanks for the clarification on who is providing the ARM.

 

[Li Mu Bai]

You're such a tease... and for some reason I love it!

My apologies, it was not my intent. Though some of the titles the gaffers were proposing were ludicrous, Startropics? I knew a little about the project so I shared, it's not as if I revealed the particular genre.

 

[Earendil]

My apologies, it was not my intent. Though some of the titles the gaffers were proposing were ludicrous, Startropics? I knew a little about the project so I shared, it's not as if I revealed the particular genre.

No worries, I appreciate the info. Feel free to tease any time you like.

 

[sfried]

Wii U will NOT be using MoSys 1T-SRAM

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=466196&page=38




(also posted in the next-gen console prediction thread, hope you all don't mind me posting this twice, but I think it's important)

Just how will they mimic that 1T-SRAM?

 

[Earendil]

Just how will they mimic that 1T-SRAM?

With extra pikmin.

 

[ERP]

Just how will they mimic that 1T-SRAM?

Why would they need to, as long as the processor/memory combination is fast enough to run existing games at the same rate the exact mechanism is irrelevant.

 

[Li Mu Bai]

You've been around for a minute then.

And look at what you've done. Your two posts have spurred around 300 posts on this.

Thanks for the clarification on who is providing the ARM.

Woah! bg, I was just attempting to steer the speculation in a more realistic direction. Retro has some seriously gifted artists, programmers, engineers, & esp. the recently infused talent. Some of those titles would have been a complete waste of it. It doesn't necessarily have to be a fps either, when I said broader demographic I was referring to the internal Nintendo studios' scope. Outside of Monolith Soft, no other development house is currently capable of reaching this audience. (sans EAD's Software Group No.3) I made the mistake of mentioning the 360/PS3 hardcore enthusiast, so Gaf assumed shooter. Retro has earned some creative freedom, & FWIW work has already begun internally some time ago on both the Wii U & 3DS Zeldas.

Back OT, I should have prefaced the deal with ARM I was told of was well over a year & half ago, I do not believe anything has changed. Though with the sheer number of component contributors to the Wii U, change is not outside the very real realm of possibility; though unlikely.

 

[Rangers]

A guy I follow on twitter who sometimes seems to claim to be a little bit of a video game insider said that the Wii U GPU was finished in June 2011, so there would be no further improvements after that time.

 

[bgassassin]

I can easily say that it wasn't. Sounds like the person is just going by some info wsippel posted a long time ago.

 

[Alucardx23]

Don't know if this has been posted, but this doesn't sound really encouraging. This is from the game director of Darksiders 2.

GameReactor: This one is all coming out for the Wii U. How has that been?

Darksiders 2 Game Director Marvin Donald: Uh, so far, so good. We have limitations based on Nintendo's progress, but, you know, that really has, the only problem that's been for us is, you know, not having an actual release date. But once we know when the Wii U has, when Nintendo has commited to a firm date, you know, we will be able to commit to a date for Darksiders II, but we're planning on it being a launch title, and so far everything's been smooth sailing.

We got the game running on their hardware pretty quickly, and the controller's been great to work with, now it's just down to deciding what we really want to do to make it a unique experience on the Wii U. You know, taking advantage of you know the extra screen and the touch capability and all that. So, you know, so we'll have a few new feature for sure, but I think visually, for the most part, it'll be pretty much the same.

You know, so far the hardware's been on par with what we have with the current generation's. Based on what I understand, the, you know, the resolution and textures and polycounts and all that stuff, we're not going to being doing anything to uprez the game, but we'll take advantage of the controller for sure.

http://www.gamereactor.se/nyheter/43021/GRTV:+Darksiders+II-intervju/

 

[liolio]

Don't know if this has been posted, but this doesn't sound really encouraging. This is from the game director of Darksiders 2.



http://www.gamereactor.se/nyheter/43021/GRTV:+Darksiders+II-intervju/

Even with conservative specs the WiiU should be able to do better. Altogether I think the problem is a storage one. 360 dvd player has set limitation on game quality for a long while...

Have N disclosed something about the optical media?

 

[Alucardx23]

Even with conservative specs the WiiU should be able to do better. Altogether I think the problem is a storage one. 360 dvd player has set limitation on game quality for a long while...

Have N disclosed something about the optical media?

Nintendo confirmed that the WiiU will have a proprietary media with basically the same specs as a blu ray disk.

http://kotaku.com/5809701/wii-u-discs-will-be-25gb-in-size

 

[liolio]

Nintendo confirmed that the WiiU will have a proprietary media with basically the same specs as a blu ray disk.

http://kotaku.com/5809701/wii-u-discs-will-be-25gb-in-size

So same syndrome as the ps3? Asset will be held back by the lesser denominator? (/ a few real high end title as BF3 that can really on some form of digital distribution?).

 

[Acert93]

PC games have often contained much higher assets than the consoles games for... wow, since 2005? Not every game mind you but in general higher resolution assets have been a PC commodity. Not sure you can blame the 360 there as the assets are available. And the reason the PS3 doesn't often get higher resolution textures on 3rd party software is because for performance reasons they often use lower resolution textures to begin with.

So, we need a new whipping boy to blame for the WiiU comment above. It couldn't be that getting a new platform, first run of software on such, up to 360/PS3 parity + another 40% or so pixels on the controller -- oh, and adding an extra SKU as the devs now have PS3/360/PC/WiiU -- that the WiiU, barring it being a performance monster, just doesn't have the 3x-10x power laying around to easily do this with those constraints? It more and more sounds like the 1.5x-2x WiiU specs are fitting.

 

[Sonic]

PC games have often contained much higher assets than the consoles games for... wow, since 2005? Not every game mind you but in general higher resolution assets have been a PC commodity. Not sure you can blame the 360 there as the assets are available. And the reason the PS3 doesn't often get higher resolution textures on 3rd party software is because for performance reasons they often use lower resolution textures to begin with.

So, we need a new whipping boy to blame for the WiiU comment above. It couldn't be that getting a new platform, first run of software on such, up to 360/PS3 parity + another 40% or so pixels on the controller -- oh, and adding an extra SKU as the devs now have PS3/360/PC/WiiU -- that the WiiU, barring it being a performance monster, just doesn't have the 3x-10x power laying around to easily do this with those constraints? It more and more sounds like the 1.5x-2x WiiU specs are fitting.

And your second paragraph is absolutely mindbogglingly disappointing. How much is this thing going to sell for? I just feel this is a stupid premise for Nintendo to launch hardware that's merely on par or twice as fast as their competitors when they could launch a much more powerful machine for the same price. They want the tablet controller to be part of the experience, I get that and they wish to focus on the tablet so intently. And what happens in 3 years when many of their games do not use the tablet controller for all that much. And the lack of being able to use more than one, allegedly, per system is also sad. Tablets are selling like hotcakes right now, they could do both. Launch a powerful machine, and launch a decently powerful tablet along side it that will easily link up to Wii U and also be its own standalone unit. 3DS might pose a problem there, but still.

I fear, like many others here, that Nintendo's relevance is diminishing again with each generation. We see the profit machine that the Xbox 360 is right now and if MS is able to make a proper generational leap with their next machine I see little reason it won't succeed just as well. I understand Nintendo wants to be innovative and outside of the box, but it doesn't mean their particular box has to be gimped.

Graphics might not be the be all end all, but they are important and they will sell games for the Wii U if the machine can actually display a noticeable improvement. Some may think a large amount, some a small, but it will help sell.

So given a launch price of $300 just how much bang for the buck could they get while breaking even considering the controller's costs as well? I know this is entirely speculative.