IBM Announces Wii Chips In Nintendo Hands 258
simoniker writes "IBM has announced that the 'Broadway' CPUs created for the Nintendo Wii have been shipping from the company's East Fishkill, N.Y., fabrication facility since earlier this year. Nintendo, it would seem, is ramping up for the launch of their next-gen console in a month or two." Joystiq and Kotaku have the news as well. From the article: "Nintendo has also confirmed their reception of IBM's chip: 'The first chips are in our possession,' said Genyo Takeda, Senior Managing Director/General Manager, Integrated Research & Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd. 'Today's milestone marks the final stage of our drive to reach both core and nontraditional gamers with an inviting, inclusive and remarkable gaming experience.'"
Digitizers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Digitizers? (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite... (Score:4, Informative)
Opposite, actually. Getting too close (within a couple feet) of the TV tends to make it hard for it to get exactly where you are pointing. I tried putting the Wiimote close to the TV to see if it helped me aim when I was playing it at E3, and when it made the pointer go nuts the representative told me that it loses sensitivity when you get that close and to stand back.
I could aim better from a distance.
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As long as it works better than the sensors I had to strap to the television for the Power Glove. I bought it new, I still have it, it still works, and I still don't know how to use it. Worst use of allowance ever.
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Re:Digitizers? (Score:4, Interesting)
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decoder = encoder
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Re:Digitizers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Been there done that.
Doh (Score:2)
My bad.
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I ran into this some years back when I had a similar setup.
Re:Digitizers? (Score:5, Interesting)
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See this [nintendo.com].
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Re:Digitizers? (Score:4, Informative)
To be honest, I'm not sure how they plan to get full positioning information from a horizontal bar, as I don't think any of their other sensors are absolute, which could lead to serious drift problems. They likely use Kalman filtering or some such to minimize the error, but I really do want to know how they stabilize this.
I suppose it would be theoretically possible for the Wiimote to also lock on to the display (the frequency would not matter, just the overall size and shape) and use that to reduce uncertainty, but for now we can only speculate on the inner workings. I for one can't wait to get my hands on one!
Queue the East Fishkill jokes here (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Queue the East Fishkill jokes here (Score:5, Funny)
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Give a man The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina Of Time and he will forget to eat for a day while his on-screen avatar goes fishing.
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Wii launch date (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just releasing a product doesn't guarantee anything. It has to live up to expectations or else the first few adopters will trash it on the net and general media and then demand will dry up. Same goes for the PS3.
It's interesting how you assume that XBOX 360 will be number 1 and that the Wii won't get past it. I know many people who would have never bought a console who are definately going to be buying a Wii. Even my girlfriend has been bugging me every week asking me when we can go buy one. This could be
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Re:Wii launch date (Score:4, Funny)
I wish *my* girlfriend looked forward to playing with my Wii with such enthusiasm.
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Microsoft plan to have shipped 15 million 360s by June 2007, Nintendo and Sony are both planning selling around 6 million by that same point. If you take a conservative estimate of 360 production for the final 6 months of 2007, around 5 million units, then both Sony and Nintendo need to make 14 million of their consoles each in 6 months and sell every one to be ahe
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Wrong, they plan to sell 6 million by March 2007, definitely not June.
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Normally, being first out of the gate is no small advantage. Companies make games because the 360 already has a fanbase, and the fanbase grows because companies are making games for it. It's a vicious cycle of momentum, one that I think will keep the 360 on top for a while.
For the record the Wii is shaping up to be my favourite, and I'll probably buy a 360 a couple years d
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I dont think the 360 will be totally dominant, but at this point I don't see the Playstation 3 outselling the 360 by enough to first overtake it and then make a significant lead in the market much before Microsoft after ready to launch their next generation.
After all, give that Microsoft pushed the 360 way ahead of when the general public were exp
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Nin
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First off, I don't think the Wii is hoping to cash in on Young Gamers but that is besides the point; the Nintendo DS was a machine of lesser abilities hoping to cash in on casual and young gamers and it is leading (and extending its lead) in eve
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"Asked her if she wanted a maid outfit. That was a mistake."
Top 10 responses ...
Oct. 2nd (Score:2)
Wii, PS3, Xbox360 (Score:5, Insightful)
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For one, I am a HUGE Zelda fan, so being able to play Twilight Princess will be AWESOME. Another big selling point for me is the virtual console since I can access NES, SNES, N64 (as well as other consoles of the past) games. I love retro gaming so having the ability to access games from all those older consoles kicks ass. I wish it could play HD-DVD's or Blu-Ray DVD's but since t
Re:Wii, PS3, Xbox360 (Score:5, Informative)
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IBM probably gets a cut of every single manufactured Cell CPU. This is IBM we're talking about, not Mother Theresa, they played a big part designing the chip, you can bet they won't let Sony get away with just letting them sell Cells by their own
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Sorry, scratch that. Apparently it's been becoming a word since 1912 [wikipedia.org].
It still sucks. Stupid American English. ;)
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Dr. Nick: Inflammable means flammable? What a country!
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Don't apologize! I'm right there with you.
Heil Grammar!
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See what I did there, started the post with the word agreed, but then went of talking about something completely different. Why should I waste time reading the article or the posts, just pick one at random and say what I came to say.
Good one, cheeseball!
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Price Points (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a really good Ars Technica article [arstechnica.com] that breaks down the prices for the xbox360 and ps3.
xbox360: Xenon CPU $106, ATI GPU $141, total mfg cost $525 (the high end model)
ps3: Cell CPU $230, nVidia GPU $70, total mfg cost $800 (remember the debate? [slashdot.org] I think $350 for the BD-ROM is too high.)
Wii: there's no information out there on what components will cost. But the total price tag will be $250, and an educated guess says that only at most $125 of that ca
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very few companies still source components for their flagship products from ebay.
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I was just pricing GPU between US$30 and US$50. Nintendo has contracted with ATI to build them a custom GPU, so they could spend anything the two companies can agree on.
The GameCube GPU would be a good reference point; Nintendo will probably spend more than that on the Wii GPU.
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That one is wrong, the price will be under $250, and quite a few pointers tell us that it'll probably be $200/200/150£ for the bare console and a $250 pack.
Not a snowball's chance in hell
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It's ironic isn't it... (Score:5, Interesting)
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We in the PC world have seen for a long time games pushing CPU technology (with GPUs).
Ibm still make serious business machines (IBM big iron), see the other post today about IBM making the fastest mainframe with POWER chips.
Wait you mean they'll have enough of them?? (Score:5, Funny)
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the more units you sell, the more money you make.
a business model based on actually making a profit is a strange concept I know, but maybe it's just crazy enough to work!
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It could make sense to limit supply (Score:2)
Actually, regardless of whether Sony or Microsoft did or will do this, it could make sense to do it. By creating an artificial scarcity, you're doing two things:
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The point is that restricting sales at the beginning may lead to higher sales down the road.
But you're right, of course: It may also lead to less games being sold, which may lead to developpers pulling support, which leads to less games which may lead to less interest in the console.
IBM Wii's on Nintendo's hands??? (Score:4, Funny)
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What a pointless article (Score:2)
So they got a part...do we really need a blow-by-blow?
Meanwhile, over at www.powercordworld.com.... (Score:2)
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Why is this news? (Score:2)
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Oh yeah, it starts the day after the Apple conf (12th of September) where they *may* unveil an upgrade of the Macbook Pros (and maybe even the MBs) to Core2 CPUs (I mean they just upgraded the iMac high end, and every MBP shipping is on hold at th
Scary flashback (Score:3, Funny)
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Fishkill (Score:2)
Their manufacturing plant, which no doubt produces some toxic chemicals, is in a town called East Fishkill? There's gotta be an interesting story behind that name :)
Re:Fishkill (Score:5, Informative)
To those unknowledgeable about the origins of the word, it sounded like New Yorkers had particularly horrific taste.
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That's pretty dang funny. Particularly because, instead of what at first seems like a bizarre and violent name for a landfill, it turns out to be the completely commonplace convention of naming a development after what you destroyed to put it there (naming a housing complex "Cedar Grove", a landfill "Fresh Water").
Higher clock than E3 dev kits? (Score:2, Interesting)
Less energy consumption usually means less heat. If there is less heat could we be seeing a higher clocked version of the chip than the one shown at E3?
Not terribly difficult (Score:2)
These are essentially upgraded versions of the Gamecube chip after all, right? With about twice the processing power and 30% less energy usage.
Sony's Cell architecture comes off as being a whole lot more complex. I don't know if IBM delivered for them on time or on budget, or how much more time they spent on architecture development. The point is that if IBM missed timely delivery on the new Wii chips, I'd be pretty surprised.
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The specs are still unannounced, but I'd doubt they would blow anyone away. It does sound like a low power consumption powerpc chip - the kind of thing that might have seen light of day in a Mac Mini or a laptop if Apple had stuck with the PPC architecture. The Wii is very unlikely to need the computing power of either the XBox 360 or PS3 though since it has a lowe
Moo (Score:2)
I knew it. The double-ewe aye aye stupid name change isn't true. Indeed, IBM even admitted it was a fabrication. Long live the Nintendo Revolution!
East Fishkill... the Cell plant? (Score:2)
I smell potential lawsuit!
IBM Chips for Cheap -- General Purpose? (Score:2)
So a few questions:
When will we see these chips getting cheap enough to use as PCs? (How many years of production will it take to make these $100 CPUs.)
Will people want that? They're optimized for games, and while there will be Linux ports for all of them, will they
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2) I'd be surprised if someone didn't get Linux up and running on it but I doubt it'll be a common practice.
3) Yeah, Cell is definitely interesting to program since its parallelism is t
Re:Summary is misleading (Score:4, Funny)
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From now on article summarys should be 10 paragrahs long in order to cover everything and make everybody happy?
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Mostly I want one for Metroid Prime 1&2, and RE4. Currently my br
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"All we know is that it's made by IBM, and is in the G5/970 family."
I guess it's better than having a completely empty, or non-existant, page.
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Dude, these numbers have been debunked, no one has any info on either the CPU, the GPU or the RAM, even Wikipedia doesn't use these numbers for god's sake!
Remember that the Wii only needs to go up to 480p/60fps (well all games are supposed to be 480p/60fps stable), the Xbox360 and the PS
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Although I think the "Controller Glove" they are talking about is something that you slip onto the Wiimote to keep it safe.
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