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The Wii's Brain Exposed

Posted by Zonk on Wed Nov 01, 2006 03:57 PM
from the delicious-brains dept.
Businesses Nintendo Entertainment Games
Jon Stokes, at the Opposable Thumbs column, discusses a final revelation of the Wii's technical prowess. Though it's been assumed since the early days of the marketing push that the Wii is basically a super-charged GameCube, a post to Acer's Hardware boards would seem to confirm that. Not, as Mr. Stokes says, that that is a bad thing: "I'm no longer nearly as upset about the implications of this move as I was back in August. In fact, thanks in large part to my DS Lite, I've gone from being disappointed at Wii's underpowered hardware to actually anticipating the new console. I plan to pick one up when they become generally available, and I'm even hoping to hook my (nongamer) wife on it."
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[+] Wii Graphics 'Better Than At E3' 400 comments
Gamespot and GameDaily have additional details on Nintendo's upcoming console. Gamespot reports on comments by Nintendo President Iwata that they were specifically not going for high-end graphics with the Wii. He goes on to say that some of their staff initially disagreed with the adoption of the Wiimote, but public and internal reaction has allayed the fears of detractors. GameDaily reports on comments from ATI, who says there is still a lot left to see from Wii's graphical output. What was shown at E3 was 'just the tip of the iceberg.' From the article: "Industry sources have said that the Wii GPU would be moderately more powerful than the GameCube's GPU, but how much more we don't know. Conservative estimates from developers have placed the Wii console as a whole at 2 - 2.5 times more powerful than the GameCube."
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  • Wii will take over the world. (Score:3, Funny)

    by krell (896769) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @03:59PM (#16679377) Journal
    Enough about its brain. Show us the Wii's pinky.

  • Supercharged! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by StonedRat (837378) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:00PM (#16679409) Homepage Journal
    And my PC is just a supercharged 386. So what?
    • Seriously ...

      I don't care much about what a system's floating point performance is, I only care what it can do. There has been far too much discussion on how powerful the Wii is with very little focus on what it means for games.

          • Re:Supercharged! (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Patoski (121455) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @07:05PM (#16682361) Homepage Journal
            It's not a vastly underpowered (for the current generation) game system being sold for more than the parts are worth (when the competition is selling hot new tech at a loss), propped up by a gimmicky controller.

            Honestly, none of what you've mentioned matters at all. The PSP is light years better than the DS from a technological point of view, but the DS is mopping the floor with the PSP. Why?

            In the end, it all comes down to games.

            If Nintendo has the games that are the most fun they will sell the most consoles. The same is true for MS and Sony... If the controller is gimmicky and the games are not very fun, it will become very clear in due course. How anyone can declare winners and losers in the console war at this point is beyond me. The party is really just getting started.
    • On the geek-hormones end of the issue, given the fact that the other 2 major players in the market are pushing 'radical' new CPU architectures--'the Cell' and the 'IBM (9xx-based?) Core Three Trio'--Nintendo's offering seems tame and low-testosterone.

      On the rational end of the issue... As long as it gets the job done who the hell cares.

    • Re:Supercharged! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Chris Burke (6130) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:22PM (#16679865) Homepage
      And my PC is just a supercharged 386. So what?

      Well, not really. The ISA may be the same, but the microarchitecture is completely different. Your PC's CPU looks nothing like a 386, it just happens to speak the same language (and certainly some new instructions, if not entire operating modes like 64-bit, besides).

      The point of the article is that the Wii's CPU is really microarchitecturally similar to the Gecko, down to the number of FP pipelines and such, and is basically a 90nm shrink of the old chip with higher clock speeds.

      Now personally I find it hard to believe that IBM would go through the trouble of shrinking the chip to 90nm (which isn't as easy as just applying a scaling factor to your old mask) without tweaking the architecture even if there were no major changes planned. I guarantee there were improvements that they either wanted to add to Gecko but didn't have time/resources for, or flaws in the Gecko that they discovered after it was produced that they would like to fix. The shrink to 90nm is the perfect time to get some of those changes in, so I'm betting they did.

      Which brings me back to your point, which was: So what? Indeed, so what? So it's the same chip, only at a much higher frequency and probably with a small percent boost in IPC performance besides. How is that bad? It isn't. It just isn't a super brand new highly experimental chip that requires new (or, going back to mainframes with slews of I/O controllers, old) programming methods. So for anyone who was hoping Nintendo would have some incredible hardware specs for them to drool over, dissapointment may ensue. Oh well, there's still a good chance it will be good enough.

      Look at the last generation: The Xbox and GC were fighting for best graphics (xbox winning mostly, but GC showing some astounding performances from time to time), and also fighting for 2nd place. 1st place went to the console with the worst graphics, but they were good enough to be part of that generation, and it had the games. The Wii will certainly be representative of this generation of graphics, even if it will be the worst in that regard. Personally I, like anyone who favors a PS2, just hope it has lots of fun games.
      • Changing the microarchitecture would have implications for backwards compatibility with Gamecube software. My personal opinion (as someone who has programmed for Gamecube in the past and is working on a next-gen game) is that they will have made no changes. The new part is just a die-shrunk up-clocked Gekko and there's nothing wrong with that.

        To back your more general point up, although people seem to have a low opinion of what the Gamecube hardware was capable of it's unwarranted. It's true that many games
    • And my PC is just a supercharged 386. So what?

      That's more than slightly disingenuous. Maintaining the x86 instruction set does not, in any way, even remotely imply that the processor you're working on right now is just a 386, but faster. There have been fundamental, major evolutions in CPU technology between that 386 and your current CPU, which make them completely different animals that just happen to look (sort of) the same from the OS' point of view.

      This isn't true for the Wii hardware vs the GC hardware
      • What with MMX, SSE, etc, it's not even true that it has the same registers and instruction set. Even assuming you could combine the 386 with enough RAM, I'd doubt you could run much contemporary software on it.
      • Call me when I can turn off in-order writes, and they provide barrier instructions so I can control the ordering from software so hyperthreading becomes more than something the P4 engineers thought of as a "compiler problem", without understanding that you don't *ever* run a single compiler-optimized instruction stream to completion without a context switch in a modern OS. You can optimize the non-interrupt code paths in the OS itself, but for apps running *ont top* of the OS, there is no such thing as a "
          • It's not a single pet feature, it's an example.

            If you want a laundry list, I can provide one, but we can start with this small list of things, which were also true of the i386 as well, making the current CPUs hopped up 386s:

            o Too few general purpose registers (this one's glaringly obvious, and compared to dumping another 2M of cache onto a chip, it's relatively easy to fix, but it's only been partially fixed in the 64 bit implementations, and there it was more or less a matter of maintaining binary compatib
    • You don't supercharge something and get something that is 1000x faster than without the "supercharging". Unless you mean that you have a 486 PC.
  • It doesn't support HDTV. I think this will be their fatal flaw for next gen console rave. With lifespan of 5 years, it will start showing its age in 2 or 3 years as HDTV become the norm. Really think this was bad decision on nintendo's part, what would it costs to upgrade the video chip and corresponding bandwidth to support 720p? Even the ps2 supported 1080i output as seen with the grand turismo.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by eln (21727) *
      I think in 2 or 3 years a significant portion of the population may have HD-capable TVs, but it will be their primary television set. It will be quite a while after that before you see secondary TVs switching up to HD. A system billing itself as a "media center" needs to have HD capabilities because it is likely to be on the main TV in the house. A pure game machine is just as likely to be in a kid's bedroom or some other secondary TV location, where HD will take longer to get to.
      • The thing of it is, very few people who have HDTVs have CRT HDTVs. Most have LCD or Plasma. I'm not sure about Plasma, but an LCD HDTV looks really crappy showing things in standard definition. It would be nice if the Wii supported some version of HDTV support, even if it's just "render at 480i, upscale the image to 720p and blur it a bit" so it doesn't look as ugly for those of us using LCD TVs.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by BenjyD (316700)
          Gamecube games look great on my 32" Samsung LCD HDTV (1366 x 768, RGB SCART connection). I think a lot of modern LCDs do a good job of displaying SD content.
    • Maybe I'm just poor (I live in New York state, we get taxed to death here), but I don't think HDTV will be "the norm" in 4-5 years. They're still too expensive, and unless people have a compelling reason to buy one (Lots of disposable income, TV breaks) then chances are they're going to keep their older sets around. They work just fine for watching TV and movies. Why spend an extra $1,000+ for HDTV when my cheap $100 box lets me watch things just fine?
      • You can buy pretty nice HDTVs for $500 now. Heck, the Dell 24" LCD monitor can be used as an HDTV. HD video looks fantastic on just about every display I've seen it on. Even on an XGA projector it looks a lot nicer than any DVD can possibly look.
        • You can buy pretty nice HDTVs for $500 now

          And I can find a pretty nice lo-def TV that I already own for $000, and it comes pre-installed.

          I won't deny that HD source video can and usually does look noticeably better than standard def, but I will deny that the average person cares enough about that improvement to spend several hundred dollars on an aesthetic upgrade.
          • Have you ever been to BestBuy on a saturday afternoon? The lines of people loading huge brown boxes containing TVs into their cars would suggest plenty of "normal" people are buying new TVs every day. And over time, and increasingly large number of them will be HD.

    • Re:Wii isn't underpowered except (Score:4, Funny)

      by SetupWeasel (54062) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:14PM (#16679693) Homepage
      I think this will be their fatal flaw for next gen console rave.

      I don't know. The PS3 has a very low ecstasy to glow stick ratio.
    • This is the GBA and Nintendo DS strategy rehashed. Both these consoles has (albeit limited in the case of the GBA) the ability to do 3D, but Nintendo basically -on purpose- ommited to make an API for it to be easily done. They want (even if it has to be done against their will) to stop developers from spending too much times with graphics and technicalities, to push them to work more on gameplay. Thats why a lot of 2D SNES/GBA games are better than their 3d counterparts. Or at least thats what Nintendo and
      • This is the GBA and Nintendo DS strategy rehashed. Both these consoles has (albeit limited in the case of the GBA) the ability to do 3D, but Nintendo basically -on purpose- ommited to make an API for it to be easily done.

        True of the GBA, but Nintendo DS uses a subset of OpenGL, similar to the "GX" API used by the GameCube.

        • The GBA's "3D" support wasn't all that 3D, anyway. More like 2.5D. It was actually pretty close to the SNES "Mode 7" capabilities, which used scaling and skewing of 2D bitmaps to give a feeling of 3D-ness.
      • Ok, I'm finally gonna bite on the Wii subject.

        Here's the deal: I love old arcade games. I have a PSP, and two of my favorite game UMDs are the Midway and Namco classic collectiosns.(you can call me a chump for not doing homebrew if you must). I also enjoy side scrollers, top scrollers and, though I've never encountered one, I'd probably like a bottom scroller too.

        But I love 3D games as well. I love eye-candy. I love the imersive experience of a Far Cry or NFS title.

        Am I wrong to love both? Should I on

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by LKM (227954)

          but the fact is that the kind of fun it will be capable of producing is going to be limited by it's graphics engine

          No, it's going to be limited by the controller. The Wii's controller is the most fun.

          Or maybe not.

          My statement is only slightly less absurd than yours. "Fun" is most certainly not going to be limited by graphics. Is "Super Mario Bros" less fun than "Charlie's Angels" simply because its graphics are very modest compared to the more recent 3D game?

          The ability to create a Wii-like experi

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Total_Wimp (564548)
            I have no problem with Nintendo's choice, nor with yours. For what it's worth, I had no problem with GameCubes either and often witnessed my daughter's friends shuttling them from house to house to play games like Super Smash Bros (it appears Nintendo knew what they were doing when they built in the handle.).

            What I have the problem with is the people who appear to be insisting that no one "needs" the better graphics hardware and, ironically, that we do "need" the interesting controller hardware of the Wii.
    • Nintendo will be criticized for this, but ultimately it will matter as little as the criticism concerning online gaming.

      Just look at the numbers. Many people were screaming about how Live and other online services were going to be the bread and butter of consoles last generation. All three systems launched with promises about their online support. Only one of the three consoles delivered, and it was the one which arguably was the worst when it came to online that won out.

      Today we've finally reahed a point w
    • HDTV is only an issue to the technoliterati. Period. This is a huge mistake people make. Unless you're sitting less than twice the diagonal size of a TV distant from it, HD is not an issue. This is one of the things that really slows functional HD adoption. The vast majority of purchases are still of relatively small screens (20-35") and they're getting placed at an 6-10ft viewing distance, at which point there is very little functional difference between HD and EDTV.

      This is also a social issue. U

    • There's no reason they can't release a souped-up Wii for HDTV down the road, keeping it all compatible. (PC games have supported multiple resolutions for ages.)

      • I really don't see all that much HD adoption on the way until at least 5 years from now. And by then we'll be about ready for another console generation. The Wii's lack of HD will probably not really hurt it. N's next console after that would likely flop without some kind of HD support, though.

        I don't know how many other people share this stance, but I have no interest in buying a PS3 or 360 until I have an HDTV in my game room, because I've seen the 360 on Standard (the TV in my game room [when High Defini

      • I doubt it.

        They may rehash their portable hardware, but it's not something they've done with their home console systems often, and even more rarely do they add new functionality to the systems instead of improving aesthetics or ergonomics.

        Like one of the other posters said, as much as this is an attempt to keep the cost of the console itself down, it is probably an attempt to get developers take their focus away from graphics and instead on gameplay and actual content, and to keep the development costs of t
  • The Gamecube could produce some stunning visuals and the Wii is even better, but both machines are optimized for 480p. There is no justification or reason to push performance when Nintendo is still firmly in the SD resolution department. Once Nintendo commits to HD, when or if that ever happens, well, obviously they're going to have to make a more powerful machine.

    While I absolutely love the visuals from the 360 and PS3, given the still relatively paltry penetration of HDTV sets in North America, the new ma
    • People seem to forget that this is a SD console, not HD. Isn't it supposed to be twice as powerful as the original XBOX? Why would you need any more power than that for SD games? It's probably going to look incredible on SD TVs.
      • My friend has a 52" Sony WEGA that I drool over. Buying a 360 or PS3 in his case makes absolute sense, but for the rest of us the cost of a new machine on an SDTV seems a bit silly.
  • ...and I'll say it again. The Wii doesn't need to be much faster to look good.

    The difference in required processing power to properly render the larger textures and more detailed models at 1080p versus what the Wii needs to do at 480p is huge. All that processing power that Microsoft and Sony will throw into 1920*1080=2073600 pixel is going to be much more than Nintendo has to worry about at 640*480=307200

    2073600/307200 = 6.75. Sony and Microsoft need to be 6.75 times as powerful as Nintendo's console to ma
    • Nintendo is focusing on what they've always focused: the family. Microsoft and Sony are targeting the power user who are easily blinded by the "ooh and ahh" factor.

      The power users are the ones who need the bragging rights of "more power" and are the ones who put emphasis on flash over function.

      The family only cares about having fun together as a family. My daughter and I still have fun with Diddy Kong Racing on our oh-so-dreadfully-inferior {/SARCASM} Nintendo 64. We don't care that it doesn't look

  • This sounds interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ant P. (974313) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:17PM (#16679753) Homepage
    They're taking one chip design and making it smaller, faster and lower power. Somewhere in the article it mentions that the 90nm version of this CPU takes about 2W at GC speeds. For reference, the DS is rated at 1.6W. You can probably predict where this is going.
    • Yeah...basically my Athlon XP 3200+ is just a smaller, faster version of the original Athlon (which was in the 600 MHz range iirc)...oh noes! That means my processor isn't any better than the 600 MHz one that was released in 2000! Also keep in mind that Nintendo is realistic with their performance numbers. When they released the number of polygons/sec that the GC was capable of, that was in a *real game*, with full hardware lights and 8 texture layers (basically what the hardware is capable of in one clo

  • The Wii's Brain Exposed (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anthony Boyd (242971) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:17PM (#16679757) Homepage
    Aw, now that's just plain mean to put this right after an article about babies' brain stems. The opportunity for misinterpretation is just too high. Sickos.
    • The first article was "Wee Brains Exposed", this one is "Wii's Brain Exposed". I don't see any possibility for confusion.
  • I'd be a lot more (excited about the XBox360 or PS3)/(upset about the Wii design) if I believed power were the thing holding back games.

    But I think to make that argument would take some serious rhetorical gymnastics. The problems with gaming clearly lie in the ideas, the general difficulty of executing complex ideas (programming complicated things, gaming or otherwise, is hard), the overemphasis on 3D graphics, and the stereotyping of controls.

    All of these interrelate; in particular the emphasis on 3D graph
    • But I just don't see "power" as our big problem right now; we've got so much to spare that we can make grass wave realistically and make water sparkle and all kinds of other things that are nowhere near as important as the amount of development time they consume would seem to indicate.

      Personally, I see that "Power" could be the biggest problem in the upcomming generation but in the complete opposite way that some people predict. In order to get the "Next Generation Graphics" (that the PS3 and XBox 360 offer
  • Here's the thing I don't get.

    Ok, so we know Nintendo produces some fun 1st-party games. And thats a great thing. If you love Nintendo's games then you know what you want, definitely a Wii.

    The Wii will not be particularly powerful hardware-wise. Some fanboys say, its not next-gen or whatever buzzword you like. Nintendo fans say, that doesn't matter, because art direction trumps graphical muscle, gameplay and plot trump flashy graphics and nice physics. Its a fair argument.

    The thing I wonder about is, t

    • I basically agree with you that I'm dissapointed in the price point, but first, you've never bought a Nintendo console for $200 that came with a game at launch.

      Is Wii sports worth $50? Eh, not to me, but the point is you can't directly compare to previous launches, because this isn't like previous launches.

      Technology becomes cheaper over time, but inflation makes dollars worth less. The fact that they've always been $200 is more a testiment to Nintendo's commitment to low prices than evidence that a new c

    • $250 is too much ... I also know I've paid $200 for each previous Nintendo console

      How much has the price of petrol/gasoline increased since 1991 when the Super NES came out? How much has the median price of 2000 hours of labour/labor increased? How much has the price of health care increased?

      I also know that technology gets cheaper over time - particularly microchips.

      Which is why you can buy "Plug and Play TV Games" based on NES era technology for 20 USD or less.

      A process shrink is neat, but shouldn

      • You're right in every respect, of course, and I'll still be buying a Wii.

        And maybe it's a function of Nintendo's previous track record, and I'm giving them flak because they've done too well in the past.

        That may all be the case.

        Nonetheless, it still feels like I'm getting pretty much the same tech for $50 more than it cost five years ago, when I'm accustomed (in the computer hardware world) to paying the same money for better tech as time passes. That's not a response that's good for Nintendo (and may expla
      • Yes, and $200 in 1985 money was more than $200 in 1991 money, and $200 in 1991 money was more than $200 in 1996 money, and $200 in 1996 money was more than $200 in 2001 money.

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