Some Wii network sniffing...
WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
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Starts with "G" and rhymes with "Smears of Door" I'll warrant.
Metroid Prime, Burnout, Loco Roco, Pikmin, Tetris, Quake II, Super Monkey Ball, PN.0.3, Wipeout, Tie Fighter, Smash TV, Gradius, R Type, Asteroids...
EDIT: BTW, Gears of War admittedly *looks* good, if you subscribe to the notion that american footballers are the pinacle of human development, but I doubt it's a great game. I won't find out first hand though, because no way on earth is my money financing Microsoft's world takeover bid.
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Yeah I dunno why we haven't seen any popped off heatspreaders. PS3 was naked-ized within hours! I really want to know if that 1T-SRAM is on-package. Though honestly I rather doubt it. That doesn't seem to jive with Miyamoto's "wanted it to be $100" statement. But who knows. 24 MB of fast SRAM right there on package could mean some really super fast RAM. Neat potential.
I also think the GPU is likely a semi-reworked Flipper. It's GC compatible, but it's not a duplicate cuz that would just be too easy.
Still, I have to say the launch games and the previews of some games out there are not a good sign. Cube is proven and understood hardware and if Hollywood was similar but notably superior it should show.
Zelda does look pretty darned good for a Cube game though. Assuming the Cube version looks the same. It's sorta on the same level as RE4 IMO.
Anyone noticed banding yet? I don't think I have.
I also think the GPU is likely a semi-reworked Flipper. It's GC compatible, but it's not a duplicate cuz that would just be too easy.
Still, I have to say the launch games and the previews of some games out there are not a good sign. Cube is proven and understood hardware and if Hollywood was similar but notably superior it should show.
Zelda does look pretty darned good for a Cube game though. Assuming the Cube version looks the same. It's sorta on the same level as RE4 IMO.
Anyone noticed banding yet? I don't think I have.
Well, part of the problem is that although Cube is theorically proven and understood hardware, not many companies have made any effort developing top-knotch stuff on it. Let's face it, apart from Nintendo's own games (1st and 2nd party) and a handful of 3rd party technical jewels (including RE4, FFCC...), many games on the Cube were crappy ports of PS2 engines.
Right now, there are many, many development houses trying to jump on the Wii bandwagon because they don't want to miss a DS-size success twice in a row, but most of those developers don't have much experience on Cube development. So they are starting from scratch, and many seem to want to make a quick buck by porting old PS2 engines and models and tackling Wiimote controls on.
The most impressive stuff shown so far on the Wii (SMG, MP3 later, Red Steel and Excite Truck at launch) is not possible to do on Cube. I'm expecting stuff like RE:Wii and FFCC2 to look really, really good.
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20061124/124359/
From the article:
Broadway - 4.2mm × 4.5mm (18.9mm2)
Hollywood:
GPU - 9.0mm x 8.0mm (72mm2)
1T-SRAM - 13.5mm x 7.0mm (94.5mm2)
Thanks for that, Mmmkay.
Broadway sure is tiny, approximately 1/12th the size of CELL. Hollywood is (very roughly) 1/4th the size of RSX.
Flipper and Gekko both were done on a 180nm process, both Hollywood and Broadway are 90nm. If they were simple process shrinks, their die area should have been quartered, right? (Or does this scale differently?)
If we assume the above, Broadway seems to have 75% more transistors than Gekko (which seems quite a lot) and Hollywood 161% more than Flipper (which also seems to high).
I'm quite sure the above is incorrect. Anyone know how the # of transistor per unit are scales with process size?
I give it 20 to 1 odds the 1T-SRAM is gone.
I'll take those odds, £5 bet from me, I'll pay with PayPal if you win
You can send the winnings anyway you like, cheque, postal order ect, but I'd prefer PayPal
Cheers. Going from that example (which is for a single process shrink, Broadway and Hollywood have been through 2 compared to their predecessors), the transistor density increase by going from 180nm to 90nm should be about (144/84)^2 ~= 3.
Now redoing the earlier calculations gives the following estimates:
Broadway has ~31% more transistors than Gekko, and
Hollywood has ~96% more transistors than Flipper.
Still quite a lot. I want to know what changed from Flipper to Hollywood, really...
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Yeah process shrinks definitely don't scale linearly. Though it seems this confirms that Broadway cannot simply be Gekko on a 90nm process. What I mean is in a perfect world Gekko would be 11mm^2 on a 90nm process (I italisized that because I'm not actually saying it should be exactly that size). The recently announced 750CL (which some people claimed was Broadway) is 16mm^2 (90nm). Where as Broadway is basically 19mm^2 (90nm). Even in the worst case scenario where we assume that 750CL is just Gekko on a 90nm process (the bigger then expected die size there for power leakage reasons) Broadway is still 19% bigger. Though I do think that is an absolute worst case scenario. I'm still not convinced that shrinking Gekko to 90nm would leave its true size 50% bigger then the best case (even in Gubbi's example with a complex CPU the difference was only 24%). So lets say worst case is that Broadway has 19% more transistors then Gekko and best case it has 39%. What could have been added in worst case and best case?
With Hollywood it seems even more obvious that its much more then just Flipper on 90nm. Again Flipper could be around 28mm^2 (in theory of course) on a 90nm process. Lets assume again that in the real world moving Flipper from 180nm to 90nm is far from perfect and it ends up needing to be 50% bigger. That's 42mm^2 for Flipper on 90nm process, but Hollywood is 72mm^2. Maybe its possible that the shrink could be 50% off from theory, but 160% off? If for a second we assume that the 42mm^2 is correct for Flipper on 90nm (and it could actually be less) what could have been added to increase that 71% to 72mm^2 ? If we assume a best case scenario (25% difference taking Flipper to 90nm) then what could have been added to increase Flippers size by 105%?
NOTE: Don't take any of these numbers as solid claims or any of the questions as totally literal, they're just reasonable guestimates and questions to try to start a discussion based on this new info.
Oh and by the way, does 94.5mm^2 sound right for 24MB of 1T-Sram on a 90nm process? It seems very big to me, but what do I know I'm only making guestimates
With Hollywood it seems even more obvious that its much more then just Flipper on 90nm. Again Flipper could be around 28mm^2 (in theory of course) on a 90nm process. Lets assume again that in the real world moving Flipper from 180nm to 90nm is far from perfect and it ends up needing to be 50% bigger. That's 42mm^2 for Flipper on 90nm process, but Hollywood is 72mm^2. Maybe its possible that the shrink could be 50% off from theory, but 160% off? If for a second we assume that the 42mm^2 is correct for Flipper on 90nm (and it could actually be less) what could have been added to increase that 71% to 72mm^2 ? If we assume a best case scenario (25% difference taking Flipper to 90nm) then what could have been added to increase Flippers size by 105%?
NOTE: Don't take any of these numbers as solid claims or any of the questions as totally literal, they're just reasonable guestimates and questions to try to start a discussion based on this new info.
Oh and by the way, does 94.5mm^2 sound right for 24MB of 1T-Sram on a 90nm process? It seems very big to me, but what do I know I'm only making guestimates
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Thanks Mmmkay, I knew those things are cheap and small but that surpasses all I ever thought about how small they are, and they are selling that for 250$ .First GC is only proven HW for 3-5 devs out there, second gfx arent the priority it Wii and third, it may be very hard to a dev use new HW when they only have it for a few months even harder if you need to present it in playable form on the GC (like in E3), lets just imagine that Wii does have vertex shaders it should be very hard to most devs to make use of them in a more than trivial way for the first year or so.
Teasy
Beaten on the CPU, anyway the 750CL is already more than just a gekko as it had some form of compression in it IIRC.
About the GPU, using yours estimates, it is about near twice as big and if one consider that a good part of the flipper is edram (which given the same rez it is probably equal in both GPUs) and that some HW would probably keep alsmost the same (sound DSP, I/O...) there is about 2,5-3x the space for everything else, a lot of room to improvement on TnL, TEV... they could upgrade (eg vertex shaders) and duplicate many of the units or just add a few more (eg physics).
Anyway what do you hope for Wii? My takes.
CPU: anything that make it faster on AI faster on AI first, and faster overall after.
GPU (worst case): vertex shaders (to offload the CPU, help the animation (bleding and such) and some new fxs), some HW for physics , some HW to offload the CPU of some rendering of the special fxs (eg shadows), 32bits textures(1/8, or more, compression)/buffer and then as much raw power as they can (TnL, filrate, tev...).
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What about that Broadon logo on the heat spreader? Think maybe networking stuff might be integrated into the GPU much like the DSP was on Flipper?
BroadOn Communications has nothing to do with networking hardware as far as I can tell. It's a company founded by former Silicon Graphics/ ArtX/ ATI guys it seems. The only thing I found was a list of many different patents that might apply to Wii, some of the stuff was about DRM and integrated shop systems and other stuff probably related to the Virtual Console.
[maven];880402 said:...
Broadway has ~31% more transistors than Gekko, and
Hollywood has ~96% more transistors than Flipper.
Still quite a lot. I want to know what changed from Flipper to Hollywood, really...
And why there appears to be so little benefit from it - with 1.5x clock and nearly twice as many transistors as Flipper, shouldn't the visual improvement from the Cube be more obvious?
Oddly enough, I touched on this earlier someplace else...
"Remember that BroadOn marking on the Hollywood chip? It's probably explained by this:
Found during first HTTP connection:
SOAPAction: "urn:nus.wsapi.broadon.com/GetSystemUpdate"
Looks like BroadOn are helping out with the updates, and not embedding 64-pipes into GPUs! They must have had more to do with the Wii, however, to get their name on a chip inside it. Providing system updates isn't something you get your name on a chip for.
Why their name is on the GPU, however, I will never know. Perhaps there simply wasn't enough space to put it anywhere else? Maybe Nintendo thought it would fuel the super-hidden-next-gen-GPU-power theory, seeing as an ex-SGI employee is believed to work there?
"That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the whole BroadOn thing.
It seems like most games coming out now where developed almost totally on a GameCube dev kit with the new controller, so that may explain things a bit (first the GC, then GC with more memory and then overclocked GC with more memory). It wasn't that long ago when we heard that developers were finally getting actual Wii development kits with Broadway and Hollywood inside (4 months ago?). I'm sure that later launch games and especially second gen Wii games will look a lot better with so much more time spent on actual Wii hardware.
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