Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

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Rangers said:
I still think the Wii U CPU is probably the Wii CPU overclocked.
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In the power budget Nintendo wants it would made a lot of sense, sadly.
Straigh forward BC, less R&D, etc.

It's a bit scary to read that kind of comment from a developer working on Tekken as I don't see the game as a technical marvel neither I would bet that it is actually stressing the Cell or Xenon :???:
 
Shifty Geezer said:
What they are struggling with is an interesting question. My immediate guess would be floating point power, for some reason (phsyics?), which may be inaccurately attributed to clock-speed where it's more a matter of speed x ALUs/vector units. We all know lower clocked CPUs can perform extremely well and efficiently, so I can only assume the reference to clock speed is either inaccurate, or a reference to the design being very Xenon-like but lower clocked.
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Or maybe just a simple way of saying...we need more power!!...without getting techy and upsetting ninty.
 
liolio said:
In the power budget Nintendo wants it would made a lot of sense, sadly.
Straigh forward BC, less R&D, etc.
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Broadway @ 45nm would be ~4mm^2. Of course it's not an overclocked Broadway.

Please, don't even "feed" that.
 
What if it was essentially Xenon but at a much lower clock. Would it then make sense? Especially if they have to rewrite the code for the DSP?
 
french toast said:
I never said it wasn't...I'm just saying it's an honest assessment or a sly dig at the console..without upsetting ninty.

Maybe they have got tdp headroom to up the clocks?
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They've already started or will be starting this month their production run. It's way too late for any changes unless they want to delay and we'd have heard something on that by now.
 
french toast said:
What about a multicore Broadway? up clocked to 2gz levels...would be a semi decent chip..
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I don't think the G3 7xx's were designed to go beyond 1ghz.

With that said, there are 3 cores in the Wii U. A "master core" with 2mb L2, and 2 cores with 512k L2.

Not sure what to make of that, but I think those of you that are looking at the direction of Broadway are going the wrong way. I also think that an underclocked Xenon would make the "100% Wii BC" a little bit more complicated.
 
liolio said:
It's a bit scary to read that kind of comment from a developer working on Tekken as I don't see the game as a technical marvel neither I would bet that it is actually stressing the Cell or Xenon :???:
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It matches comments from back in april and june. I believe this is first on the record comment. Very shocked he came right out and said it...

April report
Sources said graphical quality "won't be a problem" on Nintendo's new console, but a drop in CPU horsepower compared to 360 and PS3 could see Wii U lag behind in areas such as complicated physics and AI.

A second source working on a big name franchise said GPU and RAM power "won't be a problem" on the new console but, again, claimed Wii U struggles to match PS3 and 360 in processing power.

"We're still working on dev machines but there have definitely been some issues [in porting PS3/360 games]," our source said. "It's not actually a problem getting things up and running because the architecture is pretty conventional, but there are constraints with stuff like physics and AI processing because the hardware isn't quite as capable."

The same source concluded, bluntly: "I suppose you don't need sophisticated physics to make a Mario game."
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http://www.computerandvideogames.co...as-good-as-ps3-but-its-still-not-as-capable/?

June report
But one insider who has had access to the machine says that the console's impressive AMD Radeon-based graphics chip is off-set by a CPU that runs at low speeds, can do out-of-order processing but has fewer threads than the 360. The insider says the Wii U has the power to run Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 ports with little difficulty.
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http://kotaku.com/5920931/the-wii-us-power-problem

A lot of smoke to not be a fire at this point.

Also wasnt there reports of dev kits over heating, wonder if they have to down clock the cpu to stop the problems.
 
It makes me angry almost to read the new cpu info...however at least we know the gpu is better and the ram/bandwidth will be better...how does this all work out in real world gaming terms?..

It looks to be very unbalanced to me...
 
Perhaps it is something that will resolve itself over time... I mean if it's a quad core with one core reserved for the second screen and another reserved for the os, that would only leave 2 cores for the rest. Maybe as they lock down features, they could have a single core reserved for both functions. Of course I'm speculating... But PS3 and 360 freed up CPU resources over time... Did they not?
 
The tablet won't be running a "different game", so I don't think they would ever need to reserve a full core for the tablet.

Well, at 1.6W for 1.6GHz per core, they could put some 6* 476FP cores and still consume less than 10W for the CPU (and the GPU+RAM for some confortable ~45W), and nevermind multithreading with those much cores. AFAICT, it'd have nowhere near the FP performance of Xeon and Cell, but I guess an updated GPU should be more efficient for that, and be able to cover that in the medium/long run.
 
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