Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

[liolio]

35W may well be too high given the WiiU's form factor and that GPU would be way to big to be integrated into a 45nm CPU/GPU/SOC (assuming they'd want to go that route).

Just a thought, but a SoC and/or customised GPU might explain why Nintendo were using relatively old GPUs in their early development kits. They could represent the point on the Radeon line where the technology branched off to get Nintendo specific customisations and then go to IBM for work on integrating into a single package. Or maybe Nintendo were originally planning on a standalone GPU (back in 2009) and something convinced them to go for something smaller and cheaper.

Until someone sees inside the WiiU or we hear about a GPU fab partner I'll be keeping the SoC dream alive!

If 35 Watts is too high it's a given that's the system will lag behind the ps360 significantly.
Damned some hd6570 goes with passive cooling (you need an airflow in the box but still).
You could put a SoC and the ram within that power budget (below 40Watts).

Clearly either Nintendo needs to stop designing the box before the hardware or they were flat out lying with their tech demo and things got significantly downgrade.

We heard a lot of talk from THQ

Spoiler

which some CEO declared that they may not be here in 6 months (sad matter of a fact but not my point)

about the WiiU and darsider II, not that much from the other editors. I wonder if they saw through the screen of smoke and gave up on porting anything AAA to the box.
No HDD, underpowered, even simple ps360 ports may not prove worse the effort.

Edit I edited so it was clearer but basically I think Dr Evil made a better job at it, thanks by the way

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

That last part of your post.... I cannot understand

 

[DuckThor Evil]

That last part of your post.... I cannot understand

I'll take a shot

He says that THQ (which appears to be in deep trouble) is the only one talking about WiiU, liolio is starting to feel that perhaps other publishers have figured out that WiiU is too underpowered for making ports to it worthwhile.

 

[french toast]

Even if they do well and aren't screwed with ports, I don't expect Wii U to sell as much as Wii. However I expect the console market to shrink next gen anyway, but that's another story.

POWER6 is in-order, so we can eliminate that and from what I understand three OoO cores are still the target. There was a memory target range with 1.5GB (at least last year) being the max and lherre indicated Nintendo was going with the max. I also don't see it having that much BW, but we'll see. The target eDRAM amount was 32MB, so I don't know if that is still the same or saw an increase. Then of course is wondering how this GPU is going to turn out. That might be a part of why Nintendo didn't give GPU specs in the early target specs.

Well from what you have described that already looks better than PS360..so as long as they get the missing peice in place then i would consider buying one....thats a big ''IF''

 

[Rangers]

I'll take a shot

He says that THQ (which appears to be in deep trouble) is the only one talking about WiiU, liolio is starting to feel that perhaps other publishers have figured out that WiiU is too underpowered for making ports to it worthwhile.

Some analyst recently claimed Activision is not supporting Wii U, which I guess is new speculation if true. I guess it was unclear before?

 

[bgassassin]

Some analyst recently claimed Activision is not supporting Wii U, which I guess is new speculation if true. I guess it was unclear before?

Nah. That analyst got a quote from Activision and reinterpreted it to mean no support. The quote essentially said they haven't made any game announcements for Wii U. Nintendo hasn't made any game announcements. Activision's CEO said they will support Wii U.

http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6317743/e3-2011-activision-supporting-wii-u

 

[function]

If 35 Watts is too high it's a given that's the system will lag behind the ps360 significantly.
Damned some hd6570 goes with passive cooling (you need an airflow in the box but still).
You could put a SoC and the ram within that power budget (below 40Watts).

Perhaps I'm looking at the 4cm fan and 45nm things a bit too hard, but given just how low I think Nintendo need the BoM to be and how limited the cooling will be the be I'm just not expecting that much. I think it can get into the same ballpark as the 360 while drawing substantially less power because they should be able to save loads of power on the CPU by clocking lower.

BTW I'm expecting lower peak flops from the WiiU CPU, but that it's more resistant to code that makes the 360 bum out (OoOE, bigger L2, possibly higher L2 bandwidth, lower latency memory access etc). Super optimised 360 stuff might pose a problem though I guess.

Clearly either Nintendo needs to stop designing the box before the hardware or they were flat out lying with their tech demo and things got significantly downgrade.

At the time I thought the tech demos looked nice but couldn't see what was "next level" about them. Screen grabs showed that Link in the Zelda demo was actually really simple and low detail - way, way below a Mass Effect character, for instance. It's also possible that early dev kits may have been more powerful in some ways than the final system. As with the Xbox 360, perhaps final clocks won't quite live up to early expectations.

We heard a lot of talk from THQ

Spoiler

which some CEO declared that they may not be here in 6 months (sad matter of a fact but not my point)

about the WiiU and darsider II, not that much from the other editors. I wonder if they saw through the screen of smoke and gave up on porting anything AAA to the box.
No HDD, underpowered, even simple ps360 ports may not prove worse the effort.

Edit I edited so it was clearer but basically I think Dr Evil made a better job at it, thanks by the way

Maybe it won't be as easy to just throw a PS360 game at the WiiU and have it gobble it up as people were expecting, but with sufficient work the ports will probably be fine. I guess that could give put off some publishers that aren't expecting great market penetration with the hardcore.

I think it would be fun to see what people's lowball expectations for the WiiU are. At the very outside I think it might be possible for Nintendo to get away with a SoC with something like 160 shaders, 12 TMUs and 8 ROPS - at something like 700 mHz that would fit the rumour of "fewer shaders" while still giving you about the same minimum performance. I'm hoping for something better though.

 

[french toast]

I think it would be fun to see what people's lowball expectations for the WiiU are. At the very outside I think it might be possible for Nintendo to get away with a SoC with something like 160 shaders, 12 TMUs and 8 ROPS - at something like 700 mHz that would fit the rumour of "fewer shaders" while still giving you about the same minimum performance. I'm hoping for something better though.

If they have the nerve to release that in Late 2012..and sell it at anything higher than £80...they deserve what will happen to them..

 

[kalelovil]

I remember there being a more up to date version of this GPU Bill of Materials spreadsheet: http://vot03w.bay.livefilestore.com...S1Esk_EsjLxLCCi4caDT00Nzsw5sqZQ/gpu price.jpg

Anybody have it or can link to it?
Or does anybody know what price AMD sells the Radeon e6760 at?

I still think Nintendo could fit a 480 shader GPU or APU into a US$130 total BoM.

 

[Commenter]

If Nintendo decided to stick a low end modern GPU in there. Say a HD73XX or something then isn't it feasible that it would still be outperformed by the 6-7 year old GPU's in current gen consoles?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

If Nintendo decided to stick a low end modern GPU in there. Say a HD73XX or something then isn't it feasible that it would still be outperformed by the 6-7 year old GPU's in current gen consoles?

Everything below Cape Verde will be either a previous-gen renaming or something inside an APU, so the HD73xx are actually a Cedar (80sp VLIW5, 8TMUs, 4 ROPs).

But yeah, a console with a Cedar would be awfully weaker than Xenos or RSX+Cell, unless it was clocked at 1.5GHz or something.

 

[kalelovil]

Everything below Cape Verde will be either a previous-gen renaming or something inside an APU, so the HD73xx are actually a Cedar (80sp VLIW5, 8TMUs, 4 ROPs).

But yeah, a console with a Cedar would be awfully weaker than Xenos or RSX+Cell, unless it was clocked at 1.5GHz or something.

For the ease of porting it would be better for Nintendo to go with something which has no bottlenecks compared to Xenos. Caicos may be theoretically as powerful as Xenos but specifics such as having half the number of ROPs and TMUs could be a problem.

I still think a Turks based GPU is the most likely and logical choice. A custom-designed ultra-low voltage Radeon for use in future tablet designs as well would be my second, but much less likely, guess.

 

[pc999]

Is there anything more in gaming using edram

Excellent news: the first chips produced at GlobalFoundries’ “Fab 8″ in upstate New York are based on IBM’s latest, 32nm SOI chip technology. In a joint press release, the two companies announced that the chips will be used by customers in networking, gaming and graphics.

...

The release also notes that the chips rolling off this new line feature IBM’s embedded DRAM (eDRAM). ASN readers will remember that IBM’s eDRAM guru Subu Iyer, wrote in ASN about the role that SOI plays therein back in 2006. He noted that while eDRAMs had previously been done in bulk silicon, “The complexity adder is about half in SOI compared to bulk for deep trench based eDRAMs.”

http://www.advancedsubstratenews.com/2012/01/gfs-ny-fab-8-debuts-with-ibms-32nm-soi/
Could they be using 32nm now, after all, a year and a half is a lot of time in microprocessor time?

I remember there being a more up to date version of this GPU Bill of Materials spreadsheet: http://vot03w.bay.livefilestore.com...S1Esk_EsjLxLCCi4caDT00Nzsw5sqZQ/gpu price.jpg

Anybody have it or can link to it?
Or does anybody know what price AMD sells the Radeon e6760 at?

I still think Nintendo could fit a 480 shader GPU or APU into a US$130 total BoM.

Quite interesting to see that a 4770 card would only cost ~60$, that is only a litle more than what many XB games ask as minimun specs for their PC counterparts.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

So going back to the $180 rumour, with $50 for the controller, what can they get for $130?

I'll throw the first rock:

- $25 for bluray drive (without bluray media capabilities, so they're only paying for hardware)
- $7.5 cooling solution
- $10 case
- $7.5 PCB
- $10 for power regulators, connectors and additional logic
- $5 for 8GB eMMC
- $5 for WiFi and Bluetooth transmitters
EDIT: missed the RAM: $10 for 2GB DDR3 1333MHz

Which leaves with.. $60 for CPU and GPU.
EDIT: $50 for CPU+GPU with the RAM..

I guess.. $30 should be good enough for at least a Turks-class GPU at 40nm, am I right?

EDIT: If it's $25 for both GPU and CPU.. maybe they can still do with Turks-class GPU..

 

[pc999]

I guess.. $30 should be good enough for at least a Turks-class GPU at 40nm, am I right?

Anyone have a idea how much cost 360/PS3 CPU+GPU+Ram now? If it is (eg 45$) it would have a quite a bit to spend it seems (see below).

Anyway, reposting the above:
http://vot03w.bay.livefilestore.com...S1Esk_EsjLxLCCi4caDT00Nzsw5sqZQ/gpu price.jpg

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Anyone have a idea how much cost 360/PS3 CPU+GPU+Ram now? If it is (eg 45$) it would have a quite a bit to spend it seems (see below).

Anyway, reposting the above:
http://vot03w.bay.livefilestore.com...S1Esk_EsjLxLCCi4caDT00Nzsw5sqZQ/gpu price.jpg

I edited my post in order to include the RAM too.

I've seen an updated version of that components list, and it had up to the Northern Islands graphics cards.. I think I remember seeing it in the Southern Islands thread, but that thread is now some +200 pages long and I don't remember when I saw it..

 

[nomad]

Here is a newer BoM chart:
http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/1461/q2msa.gif

I wonder if you should also include power supply cost, perhaps about ~$15?
~$45 left to play with
$12 2GB DDR3
$33 for CPU+GPU

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Here is a newer BoM chart:
http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/1461/q2msa.gif

I wonder if you should also include power supply cost, perhaps about ~$15?
~$45 left to play with
$12 2GB DDR3
$33 for CPU+GPU

You can find a 2GB DDR3 1333MHz stick for $10 in retail, so I doubt the price at millions of units would be more than that. A safest bet would be in the $6, but $10 is the absolute maximum, unless they're going with much faster DDR3.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I guess.. $30 should be good enough for at least a Turks-class GPU at 40nm, am I right?

A Turks class GPU would rip Xenos a new one though - with ease, even if underclocked to well under the PC speeds. So it doesn't sit right with the current rumors.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Quite interesting to see that a 4770 card would only cost ~60$, that is only a litle more than what many XB games ask as minimun specs for their PC counterparts.

A 4770 is even faster than Turks, by quite a long way in fact. There's no chance the rumors would be comparing WiiU to the current gen consoles if it were packing one of those, it's getting on for 4x the overall performance.

I'm not sure what console ports would be quoting it as a minimum spec but their either leaving a massive margin of safety or the games are horribly ported. Any console port should be playable on something half as fast with at least console settings / performance even on the PC.