Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

[liolio]

A "weaker" CPU can slow down development, because devs will need to spend more time with optimization, but I can't see that as something terrible.
It's a triple core CPU after all, and the power7 architecture has lots of advantages like out of order execution, so can't be that bad i guess.

I missed something? The CPU is a power7?
I would be surprised.
Based means a bit nothing.
Power7 are design to work with their 256kb of super low latency L2 (8 cycles I believe) and their share of L3.
Breaking the L2, the L3 the 4 way multi-threading, how wide the CPU is, etc. it's no longer a power7 at all.

My believe is that a weak CPU is worse than a weak GPU, you can afford to not keep up with the graphics but with things even more relevant to the gameplay

Honestly I don't know what they have if they were constrained in power and silicon budget, & years into the ps3 life cycle, they should have gone with a rebalanced Cell (better CPU less SPuS).

 

[Ika]

I missed something? The CPU is a power7?
I would be surprised.

You did not miss anything, but speculations on the web (and in some other threads here) are suggesting that the processor might share some characteristics with power7 I should have put it more clearly that it's just a guess, my bad, sorry.

My believe is that a weak CPU is worse than a weak GPU, you can afford to not keep up with the graphics but with things even more relevant to the gameplay

I agree that "you can afford to not keep up with the graphics", but I do not agree that a weaker CPU could stop somebody in 2012 to code any gamelpay related code. These modern CPUs are very powerful, one just needs to stop throwing shitty code into them =]
As I said it might slow down development , which - indeed - could drive studios away from the hardware, but looking closely at the game industry since the ZX80, I can tell you that one might code anything to any hardware if he really wants to.

I'm more concerned about that the RAM (or the cache) will be very slow like with the N64, or that it's not really a 3 core CPU and it will turn out that the other two cores are seriously handicapped, and only there for the tablet and stuffz, because one full core just won't cut it, not today.

Honestly I don't know what they have if they were constrained in power and silicon budget, & years into the ps3 life cycle, they should have gone with a rebalanced Cell (better CPU less SPuS).

You are absolutely right, but I'm afraid Nintendo will go after the cheapest solution and not for the most efficient one.

 

[pc999]

I missed something? The CPU is a power7?
I would be surprised.
Based means a bit nothing.
Power7 are design to work with their 256kb of super low latency L2 (8 cycles I believe) and their share of L3.
Breaking the L2, the L3 the 4 way multi-threading, how wide the CPU is, etc. it's no longer a power7 at all.

My believe is that a weak CPU is worse than a weak GPU, you can afford to not keep up with the graphics but with things even more relevant to the gameplay

Honestly I don't know what they have if they were constrained in power and silicon budget, & years into the ps3 life cycle, they should have gone with a rebalanced Cell (better CPU less SPuS).

Every rumor and/or interpretation of info point to it. The core parts are also relatively small a it does not use much power too, seems like good fit.

That is why I think it would be very interesting to compare both, according to wikipedia at 3 Ghz each core would be able to get ~25 Gflops, if tricore would put it around Xenon (77 Gflops IIRC).

 

[wsippel]

It's possible that both the audio DSP and ARM I/O are not being used by some of the ones having issues and it's all being placed on the CPU to handle what they would have. And knowing Nintendo they probably didn't design the CPU to have that kind of burden put on it since they added the two other components to begin with.

Well, to quote Audiokinetic:

The Wwise software pipeline is now supported on the Wii U which leverages all features available on the other software platforms like the Xbox360 and PS3. The software pipeline simplifies ports on the Wii U and allows for the creation of comprehensive and sophisticated sound design.

And from the changelog:

Wii U basic software pipeline is now optimized (decoders, resampler, mix).

So Wwise seems to do on the CPU what should be done on the DSP for the sake of portability, with the 120MHz audio DSP seemingly relegated to being little more than a rather fancy volume controller. Assassin's Creed 3, Darksiders 2 and Arkham City are all ports - and they all use Wwise (which also performed like ass on Wii U until March 2012).

 

[pc999]

Well, to quote Audiokinetic:


And from the changelog:


So Wwise seems to do on the CPU what should be done on the DSP for the sake of portability, with the 120MHz audio DSP seemingly relegated to being little more than a rather fancy volume controller. Assassin's Creed 3, Darksiders 2 and Arkham City are all ports - and they all use Wwise (which also performed like ass on Wii U until March 2012).

Still if CPUs are more or less the same it should be easy to port, giving a advantage to exclusive games? Although izotope products (audio fx) are as good sounding as CPU intensive.

Any info on the DSP that you can share (or any other part), I personally found the audio on 3DS quite impressive for what it is, specially the stereo fx.




Anyway that wouldnt give them much time with good dev tools.

 

[wsippel]

Still if CPUs are more or less the same it should be easy to port, giving a advantage to exclusive games? Although izotope products (audio fx) are as good sounding as CPU intensive.

Yes. Audiokinetic stated that they reached roughly 360 levels of performance in March (in some cases better), and they were not done optimizing back then. That's for the software pipeline, of course.

Any info on the DSP that you can share (or any other part), I personally found the audio on 3DS quite impressive for what it is, specially the stereo fx.

Nope, sorry. I don't even know who provides the DSP. Probably Ceva or Tensilica, maybe Macronix/ Modiotek.

 

[pc999]

Yes. Audiokinetic stated that they reached roughly 360 levels of performance in March (in some cases better), and they were not done optimizing back then. That's for the software pipeline, of course.

That is good to know.

Nope, sorry. I don't even know who provides the DSP. Probably Ceva or Tensilica, maybe Macronix/ Modiotek.

You probably know more than me about audio DSPs, is there any "off the shelf" dsp that they could use and incorporate useful features for gaming audio (eg, virtual 5.1 on headphones/2.1, (convolution) reverbs (!) noise cancellation for audio input...), so they could really offload the CPU and get a very nice sound?

 

[wsippel]

You probably know more than me about audio DSPs, is there any "off the shelf" dsp that they could use and incorporate useful features for gaming audio (eg, virtual 5.1 on headphones/2.1, (convolution) reverbs (!) noise cancellation for audio input...), so they could really offload the CPU and get a very nice sound?

There are quite a few options. On the high end, Analog Devices TigerSharc or Blackfin DSPs come to mind. Too expensive, though. Something along the lines of the Creative DA255 seems more likely. In fact, the DA255 even kinda matches the leaks, running at a rather low clock speed (compared to current Ceva or Tensilica designs).

 

[liolio]

Every rumor and/or interpretation of info point to it. The core parts are also relatively small a it does not use much power too, seems like good fit.

That is why I think it would be very interesting to compare both, according to wikipedia at 3 Ghz each core would be able to get ~25 Gflops, if tricore would put it around Xenon (77 Gflops IIRC).

You don't get it "based" means nothing.
As I said a power7 without its fast l@, L3 4 way SMT, etc is not a power7.
"Based" does not offer any insight on what the CPU actually is and how it performs.

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

imho even all ps3 game had to run at 1080p at launch anyway... personally I don't give so much credits to this kinda of statements; if wiiu it's barely more powerful of ps3/360 I'm not surprise to see subhd game on it, especially at 60 fps...

hmmm, yeah .

well, on the other side note, I had heard ubisoft saying that the wii-u has much more memory to work with than cpu/gpu power. so it maybe only 720p for gaming but the plus side is the solid performance. which sounds about right for nintendo, getting their mario, star fox, zelda, metroid, and supersmash bro games running solid might be more important for them.

 

[bgassassin]

I find it a bit disheartening that the CPU might be a bottleneck.
I wonder what kind of CPU Nintendo selected.

BgAssassin did your hear anything more specific wrt to the CPU?
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Having gone with IBM and wanting lower operation ( my assumption) they should have shamelessly reuse the SPUs.
I haven't read a presentations on the matter for a long while but how SPU time does it take to the Cell to keep up Xenon if you put aside lot of the graphic loads that would be handle by the GPU in a WiUU?
Clock for clock I would say that 2 is more than enough.
I don't know if it would be doable to have the SPU running at 3.2GHz with the CPU running significantly slower. Either way they may have gone with 4 SPUs within a CPU running slower.
Basically a new Cell. I believe it would have keep up not only with Xenon but also with PC parts for a while.
The Cell is like this @45nm. It's a gross estimate but Imeasure a power7 core (with its L2) ~29sq.mm.
4 SPUs measure pretty much the same size (a bit below).
Within the Cell die size you substitute 4 SPus for of power7 core and fill what was the L2 + PPE with L3 you would fit quiet an amount of cache (gross paint estimate ~4MB).

Either way it's just to give idea a single CPU achieving nicer performances per cycle than a PPU and 3/4 SPUs might have been doable within +/-100 sq.mm of silicon.

I don't know Wiiu CPU size but I'm confident they could have trade two of their cores with at least 2 SPUs. SPUs are that tiny. Even embedded processors with 512KB of cache can't be as tiny (@45nm that's it).
Spus are 6.5 sq.mm with their local store

Still SPUs are very un-Nintendo but it was an obvious solution to meet the requirement of this gen CPU and a bit forward actually.

Getting extra details been very tough. Most likely due to Nintendo keeping stuff like that close to their chests. But the basic info on the GPU is that it's supposed to have three cores w/ two threads per core.

Also to put things into context, all of this took place in the 4th dev kit. While the 5th (final) kits came out in January, Nintendo put that kit through a rather extended tweaking phase. Mostly to get the hardware and some 3rd party middleware to run efficiently. Though it also saw a small (emphasis on small) bump in power. It seems that Nintendo is really just now getting final kits out to most companies hands. So maybe we'll begin to learn more soon.

 

[ninzel]

Latest rumor from a supposed Ubi employee is CPU similar to PS360,GPU 1.5X.
Plus there's some side by WiiU to PS3 screens and I don't see any difference. Both Batman AC and AC3 look exactly as good as the PS3 version,though the pics I saw were small versions.

http://www.gonintendo.com/content/uploads/images/2012_6/BatmanVergleichBig.jpg
http://gonintendo.com/?mode=viewstory&id=178843

 

[Squilliam]

Maybe the reason why there was some porting problems is that the DSP isn't being used at this early stage and perhaps the design of the console anticipates that much of the vector processing be done on the GPU instead? It seems to make sense that if you've got a modern GPU then it can handle much more itself rather than relying so much on the CPU as in Xbox 360 games?

 

[SedentaryJourney]

Latest rumor from a supposed Ubi employee is CPU similar to PS360,GPU 1.5X.
Plus there's some side by WiiU to PS3 screens and I don't see any difference. Both Batman AC and AC3 look exactly as good as the PS3 version,though the pics I saw were small versions.

http://www.gonintendo.com/content/uploads/images/2012_6/BatmanVergleichBig.jpg
http://gonintendo.com/?mode=viewstory&id=178843

The Wii U Batman shots are horribly compressed and the quality of the AC3 shots is a joke. Just seems like bait to draw traffic. If the Wii U specs are accurate I can't see it not matching PS360 quite easily if not having a clear advantage. It just doesn't jive.

 

[wsippel]

Judging by the toolchain Nintendo uses, I think we can rule out anything based on Cell or Power7 (or any PowerX based design, really). Because GHS doesn't support any of those. They seem to focus on embedded 32bit PowerPC cores like the IBM 4xx and Freescale e500 line. I consider something 470S based more and more likely at this point. As the Wii U CPU is supposedly dual threaded, it might be a CMT design instead of SMT or something.

 

[babybumb]

The Wii U Batman shots are horribly compressed and the quality of the AC3 shots is a joke. Just seems like bait to draw traffic. If the Wii U specs are accurate I can't see it not matching PS360 quite easily if not having a clear advantage. It just doesn't jive.

Specs dont reveal much. I think the CPU is clocked much lower than 3.2Ghz. GPU grunt is anyones guess but..

And then there was the story in develop.net not delivering on target specs it gave out last year. I do wonder if this has anything to do with total absense of EA Sports even though Peter Moore visited Japan last year to discuss the machine

 

[AlNom]

http://www.gonintendo.com/content/uploads/images/2012_6/BatmanVergleichBig.jpg

Er... The PS3 version of Arkham City doesn't actually have AA (even the recorded FMV) nor is it oversampled as in that image.

 

[Xenus]

Not only that but the same as PS360 and 1.5x PS360 is a joke. The CPU's in the machines aren't very comparable let alone being called equal while the GPU's are vastly different as well.

 

[stiftl]

Er... The PS3 version of Arkham City doesn't actually have AA (even the recorded FMV) nor is it oversampled as in that image.

This. Doesn't look like the PS3 version at all to me. Digital Foundry article also says that WiiU version looks better.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-wiiu-e3-2012

Also most interesting sentence IMO:

Reports continue to emerge from sources suggesting that Wii U is significantly more powerful than the current batch of titles may lead us to believe - the obvious inference being that these games have been created on incomplete hardware, perhaps with development tools that are still evolving, by studios unfamiliar with the hardware.

 

[Xenus]

Except in this case those reports make no sense. Apart form the pad itself anything else should be easily surpassed by a dev kit if they so wanted.