Nintendo Wii U Teardown Reveals Simple Design 276
Vigile writes "Nintendo has never been known to be very aggressive with its gaming console hardware and with today's release (in the U.S.) of the Wii U we are seeing a continuation of that business model. PC Perspective spent several hours last night taking apart a brand new console to reveal a very simplistic board and platform design topped off with the single multi-chip module that holds the IBM PowerPC CPU and the AMD GPU. The system includes 2GB of GDDR3 memory from Samsung and Foxconn/Hon-Hai built wireless controllers for WiFi and streaming video the gamepad. Even though this system is five years newer, many analysts estimate the processing power of Nintendo's Wii U to be just ahead of what you have in the Xbox 360 today."
well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Interesting)
that's the nintendo way. which device from them had a complicated board or cutting edge performance?
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Informative)
The N64 was definitely cutting edge, but hard to program and limited by its cartridges.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Funny)
I remember in nintendo power magazine, they had a long article that basically said cartridges were the space shuttle, and cd roms were snails. At the end of the article, they said that if anybody tells you that the future belongs to cd roms, you should tell them that the future doesn't belong to snails.
Ironically, today their consoles perform at a snails pace compared to their competitors.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
They were absolutely right. PC games have required full installation for years, and consoles even require significant portions of many games to be installed to the hard drive first. Meanwhile, Flash/EEPROM based cartridges are functionally very similar to USB sticks and SSDs which are more ubiquitous than ever before.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Interesting)
I also dont remember any substantial load times for any cartridge-based games. If you want a good comparison, compare the performance of Chrono Trigger on the SNES to the Chrono Trigger / Final Fantasy CD for the Playstation; every time you paused or had a battle on the PS version, you incurred a 30 second load time which made the game unplayable.
There are a lot of benefits to discs, but there are also a lot of drawbacks-- notably, seek performance sucks compared to cartridge.
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It's worth noting that N64 cartridges were heavily compressed, so they didn't load "instantly" like the NES/SNES carts did. Some games I tried were surprisingly slow.
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Admittedly I chose the most well known example of stupidly long load times I could think of, but until playing disc-based games I do not think I ever saw a load time, and that was my first impression-- "whats the benefit if I have to stay here loading all the time".
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Informative)
and consoles even require significant portions of many games to be installed to the hard drive first.
That's just not true. All Xbox 360 DVD-based games are required to run with minimal installation (and minimal patch size - though DLC is different, of course), so they will run even on systems with 4GB flash instead of an HDD. More recently they MS added support for installing the full game to HDD (which does make a big difference in load times) but it it's definitely not *required*.
As for EEPROM-based cartridges, it's about cost. Materials for 9GB DVD is under $0.30. Manufacturing an 8GB cart would be somewhere between $5-10 to make (given 4GB 3DS carts are estimated at $3-5). That is a HUGE difference in margin when you sell a couple million of them. Even Nintendo gave up on the carts for the GC an Wii since it would be insane to leave that money on the table.
Do you know (no matter what Nintendo tells people) what the *biggest* advantage to carts was over CDs/DVDs? Lack of piracy. But eventually Nintendo realized the cost of piracy was well under the cost difference from switching to optical media, so they did.
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>That's just not true. All Xbox 360 DVD-based games are required to run with minimal installation (and minimal patch size - though DLC is different, of course), so they will run even on systems with 4GB flash instead of an HDD. More recently they MS added support for installing the full game to HDD (which does make a big difference in load times) but it it's definitely not *required*.
This hasn't been true for a long time. I've personally bought (and returned) a final fantasy game that could not install w
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"They were absolutely right. PC games have required full installation for years, and consoles even require significant portions of many games to be installed to the hard drive first."
Not quite, hard drives and CD/DVD/BD-R media allows for huge amounts of content no cartridge could ever match at the same price, cartridges died for a damn good reason. Being faster doesn't mean much when your game is 100's of times less detailed and has much less content because chips are more expensive and infinitely smaller
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But all that loaded data has to go somewhere, and consoles have traditionally had little memory. That means that in order to get large, detailed levels you need to stream data from the game media to memory in real time. And at that point the speed of media becomes a limiting factor for your level of detail.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:4, Interesting)
Did you mean absolutely wrong or are you internally twisting logic to fit your worldview?
Actually, they were right, albeit for the time. In the mid-nineties, CD-ROM drives were slow as hell (The Playstation and Saturn only had a 2x drive, compared to the 1x drive of the Sega CD or the 12x drive of the next-gen Dreamcast). Cartridges blew them out of the water for speed, especially random-access times. It isn't a huge problem now since read speeds have greatly increased, but it was a big deal back then.
PC games have required full installation for years, and consoles even require significant portions of many games to be installed to the hard drive first.
Here we go. PC games using CDs for years means Nintendo was right about predicting the death of CDs. That's pretty twisted.
But PCs weren't running the games from the CDs. The games were installed on a hard drive first because hard drives are faster, especially on random-access times, which for loading random textures or sprites is a plus. Typically, the only thing the CD was needed for in PC games was copy-protection and loading video cutscenes.
The major drawbacks of cartridges are cost and storage size. The Playstation was dog-slow but it could hold way more data than the N64 cartridges and because they were very cheap, publishers went with the Playstation. It also helped that the Playstation had an 18 month lead on the N64.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Informative)
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Ironically, today their consoles perform at a snails pace compared to their competitors.
That's because the space shuttle has been retired.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:4, Informative)
The bad developers had atrocious load times. Filling 2MB of memory from a CD image doesn't take that long.
Driver on the PS1 had load times in excess of 30 seconds between scenes. There was more loading than actual driving. With Spyro the Dragon, load times were hardly a problem.
I remember being amazed at Gran Turismo having such short load times -- literally 2 seconds from menu to race in some cases. Then the PS3 came out, and Gran Turismo 5, with its 10+ GB HD install, has load times so long you can make a sandwich.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't say all ways but:
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Informative)
I would hope that the initial DualShock controller would be an impovement on the N64s initial designs, after all it came out 2 years later. If you would like to read at similar stories, please research the six-axis controller and the Playstation Move.
The N64 as a whole wasn't as durable of a system as I would have liked. But meh.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:4, Informative)
Controller: Give you that one, they sucked harder than a vietnamese prostitute. In the seventies :P
Vibration pack: Oh come ON. Nintendo introduced vibrating controllers to the console market (for PC "Force Feedback" had been available for a loooooong time). Then Sony improved it (Rumble released April 1997, Dual Shock released November 30th 1997 - 6 months after Nintendo).
One analog stick: Nintendo introduced the concept to consoles and gamepads. Before there had been joysticks but never on a controller like this. Yeah, compared to PS1 Dual Analog (and later Dual Shock) it sucked, but do remember that Nintendo had developed this already in 1995 (though the console itself turned up 1996), and Sony had the Dual Analog ready a whole year after that - well into the lifetime of the PS1, so it wasn't on every PS1 the way the N64 controller was.
Cooling: Never happened to my N64, despite having it on for 24-hour marathons of DK64. Might've been a problem with your specific unit or a specific game? Not saying it didn't happen, just that it probably wasn't a general fault.
Cartridges: Aye, they crap out when kids do that, but it's not NEARLY as bad as scratched discs. You seen the kids' DVD collection at your average family? Yeah, they would have been equally scratched in your family.
From what I remember the N64 was more powerful hardware-wise but suffered from the cartridge memory restrictions and the fact that it was hard to develop for and therefore max the performance. When you had the option of having a buttload of textures and CD-quality music on the PS1 vs few-and-compressed textures and synthesized music on the N64, the choice was rather clear. It got better with the GameCube, but 1.5GB vs 4GB again turned out to be a really painful limitation...
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Vibration pack: Oh come ON. Nintendo introduced vibrating controllers to the console market (for PC "Force Feedback" had been available for a loooooong time). Then Sony improved it (Rumble released April 1997, Dual Shock released November 30th 1997 - 6 months after Nintendo).
It's debatable if Sony improved it or not. Their version didn't need a battery but the Nintendo packs had a much better feel to them. The various Playstation rumble systems just vibrate like a cheap subwoofer, pretty much on/off only. The N64 ones managed to produce a different sensation for different situations in games, e.g. different guns in Goldeneye. You could tell what gun you had just from the way it felt.
The Dreamcast was the pinnacle of rumble IMHO. In games like Metropolis Street Racer you could f
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It's interesting how polarizing the opinions on the N64 controllers are. I played the hell out of N64 games when they were current as a teenager, and to this day I still find the N64 controller one of the most comfortable and natural controllers to use. So I wonder if childhood acclimation has anything to do with it. (I feel the same about the Atari 2600/800 standard Joystick, which also has similar polarizing opinion). On the other hand, I never cared for Genesis controllers even though many people preferr
The CPU on the game cube was special. (Score:2, Interesting)
It allowed for Waverace to run a circular wave model for the entire course at once. Gauging consoles against the PC model that Xbox introduced is fallacy.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
which device from them had a complicated board or cutting edge performance?
Nintendo 64 had cutting edge performance. 3D performance was better than most $2,000 computers at the time.
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The Playstation came out in late 1994 and was arguably better in many respects. The N64's architecture was clever - the GPU was essentially a programmable DSP style device. Unfortunately it was crippled by a relatively low fill rate and a tiny amount of text RAM (4k, effectively halved to just 2k due to the design of SGI's rendering code). That is why texturing in N64 games is always terrible compared to other consoles of the era.
Overall the N64 suffered from the same problem as the Sega Saturn - it was jus
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, your K6-2 450Mhz CPU released on the 26-Feb-1999 was faster than the N64 released in 1996.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:5, Informative)
You're joking, right? My PC at the time probably cost less than $1,000 and it had a K6-2 450MHz, a Matrox Millennium II and dual Voodoo II cards. I used to play Unreal at maximum settings on that thing. By comparison, the N64 was every bit the toy that it was meant to be.
Ignoring for the fact that your computer came out years after the Nintendo 64...
A voodoo 2 card cost $300. You had a Matrox Millenium II and 2x $300 cards which means you somehow managed after $200 for windows to find a barebones system for $200? Pray tell how you accomplished this feat AC.
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In 1996 a Voodoo 1 card cost $300+ and you had to buy a 2D card too which also often ran at least another $100. So you were looking at $400 just for the video card. $400 + $1500 midrange PC = $2,000 PC.
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SNES and N64
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on how you measure speed. Both had extremely advanced graphics hardware that handled the most computationally intensive stuff in hardware separately from the cpu, so they could accomplish tasks that competing systems lacked the power to achieve, and did not require particularly fast cpu's (although the cpu's were quite capable. The 65816 in the SNES was essentially an early RISC-like processor, and highly cycle efficient--it was what made it possible for the Apple II gs to implement a full Mac-like GUI of much higher quality than Intel based PCs with nominally faster hardware could handle.) The SNES could handle large 2D sprites in hardware and could scale and rotate bitmaps, which made it possible to reproduce the graphical appearance of arcade games that ran on hardware that cost thousands of dollars, and could produce graphical effects that competing systems could not manage. The N64 was the only machine of its generation that could do true perspective graphics, with antialiasing and correct 3D perspective scaling of textures. The competing systems of the time (the PS1 and Saturn) lacked the power to do this at all--both of them "cheated" by scaling texture bitmaps in 2-dimensions, producing a variety of graphical artifacts including textures that shifted bizarrely as the perspective changed.
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When you factor in the 1 GB reserved for the OS, it's just slightly more than twice the amount of RAM the 360 has (480 MB vs 1 GB).
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Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:4, Informative)
The Xbox 360 windows-based-os only uses about 32MB of RAM. That 480MB is after the OS usage and available for games.
If you want to start one of my game-dev friends on a rant ask them about the PS3 OS's RAM usage. :P
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I'm sure the PS3 uses more but it is a better system so it's putting it to good use.
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can't wait to play games my 2005 era pc could play.
Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
Simplicity of design is an important factor (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, part of the problem is just how you define 'Just ahead of'. Part of the problem in the last cycle with the PS3 particularly, from what I undestand, was the complexity of developing the software for the multi-core Cell processor architecture. Even if the speed of the Wii U overall isn't much better overall, the fact that the architecture is simpler may make it easier for developers to wring better performance out of their games. The fastest system in the world isn't going to matter if it's so hard to develop for that you end up writing poorly performant code.
We'll have to wait and see how well newly released titles post-launch are able to do with the new hardware.
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Thats not even the kicker. The kicker is that the PS3 was SO far ahead that it ultimately didn't matter. The Cell processor never took off, developers stuck with the simpler (and cheaper) 360 architecture and the PS3 was left with a complicated design that few people wanted to bother mastering.
Being ahead of the curve is ALWAYS a risk not (necessarily) a reward.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Instead of being the first console of the next generation, the Wii U is Nintendo's second console for the "current" generation.
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No, we tapped out the PS2.
See Shadow of the Colossus.
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Re:Simplicity of design is an important factor (Score:5, Informative)
Because of NDA I can't really say much, but i'd take developing for WiiU than for 360 or PS3 any day. The Hardware, APIs are much simpler and familiar. The hardware in WiiU is DX10 level, while 360 and PS3 are DX9 level with some extra stuff hacked on.
Basically that means, besides the more friendly and flexible hardware, implementing most common rendering techniques can be done more efficiently. (OpenGL 3.x features, OpenCL).
So it's not just about "raw performance". In contrast, DX11 level hardware (what will likely power PS4 or xb720), even if likely to be much faster, won't be that different to program for than WiiU.
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well there is a balance, with a complex archiecture you can obtain more peak performance for the same cost of manufacturing. But you increase the cost of designing the hardware.
Also a complex architecture means that reaching the peak performance will be more difficult for the programmers.
So with a simpler architecture (such as what appears to be in the wiiU), you have a lower peak performance, but reaching it is much easier. And in practice the amount of performance you typically get from a simpler system m
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always though it was the opposite. More complicated architecture meant more optimisation which meant more performance.
More complicated can also mean more pitfalls. Game design is done on a merciless schedule. You can't wring out every last ounce of performance from an architecture that was so complicated you spent all your development time getting the damn thing to work.
Re:Simplicity of design is an important factor (Score:5, Interesting)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Simplicity of design is an important factor (Score:4, Interesting)
More complicated architecture meant more optimisation which meant more performance
The more complicated archictures required more optimisation (PS3 for example), but that was only to struggle to get them close to the performance of the easier to dev for machines (eg 360). When we started in the PS2 days, the XBOX was a doddle to make work (and most of the optimisation work was getting most out of the shadersm or actually working on you know, the game code!), however the PS2 (which was a weaker machine) had sales figures that translated to a bigger profit. Sadly, the PS2 was a PITA to work with (interesting from an 'engineering challenge' point of view, but hideous from a commercial development perspective), but given the number of sold units, we didn't have much choice but to optimise the hell out of it.....
:/
The same situation came about with the PS3, except this time the number of PS3 units sold made it very hard to justify the expense of optimising games for it, so we didn't. The early release titles were pretty terrible, and it took quite a few years before the games were approaching those of the 360. If sony make the PS4 as esoteric as the PS3, it will be the last console they ever make. I think it's fair to say that the PS4 will infact be a bog standard 0x64 PC dressed up like a console. To do anything different would kill off playstation imho.
Anyhow, it won't be long before the Sony PR machine kicks into work, and we start hearing how Saddam Hussein will be importing 2000 ps4's to build the worlds most powerful supercomputer, and the fanboys start chanting about how the PS4 will be the most powerful console ever (even though it isn't). Happens everytime, and will happen again. This time around though, I think the iPhone will win out
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It's clearly no 360/PS3 (Score:2, Interesting)
The WiiU is able to handle many multiplatform games in 1080p that the existing consoles can barely run at 720p. That alone suggests it's at least 2x more powerful or so. Also consider that developers have had far longer to optimize to the other consoles, and it could be even more capable. And what's more, it has 4x the 360's RAM.
It may not be as different from the PS3 / 360 as they were from the PS2 / Xbox, but saying it's barely an improvement over the current crop is clearly bullshit.
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Re:It's clearly no 360/PS3 (Score:4, Interesting)
It will almost certainly be the least capable system of its generation but it's not easy to compare it against the current generation for the mere fact developers are only learning how to use it, it has more screens and it will no doubt make it more obvious which developers are better than others.
Let me know when it's open to homebrew (Score:2)
Sounds like it would make a great media player for a change.
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I agree. I know it's just being released, but I'm eager to hear if the communications with the controller are encrypted or not, and whether it uses 'off the shelf' parts/protocols that would be easy to duplicate. Just as lots of homebrew coolness has come out of the Wii controller, it'd be interesting to find out if something similar can be done for the Wii U controller. Not just for being a portable media player, but other cool things. Maybe even implement a PC display driver so people could use it as a ch
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It uses Wifi 802.11n for both controls and video to the new pad. Some cool software hacks, but standard 802.11n for the base.
Bluetooth still for the regular Wiimote.
VNC on Android (Score:3)
Just as lots of homebrew coolness has come out of the Wii controller, it'd be interesting to find out if something similar can be done for the Wii U controller.
The Wii Remote was special because it was a relatively cheap accelerometer wand. But I just don't really see the unique selling point of the Wii U GamePad over an Android tablet, especially once this Archos product that combines an Android tablet with traditional gaming buttons [wikipedia.org] comes out.
Maybe even implement a PC display driver so people could use it as a cheap extra screen for their home computer.
If you just want to show PC graphics on a tablet, I seem to remember VNC clients [google.com] being available for Android tablets.
The PC is open (Score:2)
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I like to converge devices. Anyway, I have a PC now.
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I'm sure it's on bushing's to-do list. (Using the new colloquial definition of root) He got the Wii rooted in like six months. Nowadays you can easily get a "Homebrew Channel" on your homescreen, which acts like an App Store for awesome stuff like emulators, gameshark-esque hacking devices, media players, even a virtualmachine host.
Old Wii games resolution? (Score:2)
What about other Wii games?
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I don't think so. It will probably only run exactly the way it did on the Wii, much like Gamecube games aren't improved by playing on the Wii.
It's possible they might do some upscaling or antialiasing, though. I don't think it's likely, but it's not implausible.
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I am wondering: will the Zelda Twilight Princess run in full HDMI resolution on new Wii U? Or it will have the "original" pretty low resolution?
I don't think so. It will probably only run exactly the way it did on the Wii [..] It's possible they might do some upscaling or antialiasing, though.
I believe that's what he was suggesting anyway.
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Yes and no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Somewhat misleading. While the CPU power of the Wii U most certainly lies in the realm of what you see in the 360 (rumor is it's basically a 3 core, overclocked Wii processor), the video power is a decent step up. We're talking about a semi modern GPU that supports all sorts of bells and whistles none of the last gen consoles did. The Wii U will most certainly be left in the dust by the PS4/720, but the beautiful thing about it is that it should probably be able to play next gen multi-platform ports in 720p. Which will be fine for most people, as half the HDTVs out there are only 720p to begin with (and look just fine).
Re:Yes and no... (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you see some source I haven't? I've been scouring the net regularly for detailed specs on the Wii U, and as of right now, I can't find any reputable specs for the CPU or GPU.
We do know that it's a POWER-based CPU, almost definitely POWER7, but it could be single-core for all we know (although the rumors seem to have settled on quad-core, with some level of SMT, with a clock speed in the 3GHz range). And the GPU seems to be a complete mystery, other than it being made by AMD.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm more curious as to where you got that info so I can read it myself.
I'll also note that, if the rumors are right, it basically confirms my "half-generation" hypothesis, that Nintendo is deliberately designing their consoles to be half a generation behind Microsoft/Sony, so they get lower hardware costs, better thermal bounds, and can just follow the architecture of the "winning" console instead of risking a less established architecture, but are still "close enough" to the current-gen to be competitive for the hardcore gamers, and are enough of an improvement on the last generation to entice their own customers to upgrade.
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The GPU is arguably a 4xxx or 5xxx chip (depending on the reference) which puts it light years ahead of the 360 & PS3. It's older and slower than the most modern stuff but it could run TF2 in 1080 and other quality PC games easily. If there is serious cpu/gpu lag it's half-baked instructions in the OS holding it back still. Course I take such comments as heresay simply because they wouldn't screw a launch over like that if they could help it.
Nintendo opted to go cheaper so they could release at close
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The CPU is triple core evolution of what's in the Wii and it's definitely not POWER7 contrary to some rumours and vague misleading PR from IBM that they have retracted later.
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The Wii U makes use of an AMD 7 series GPU with 32MB of embedded eDRAM
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Good source there, but I have to take that one more skeptically than I normally would take an Ars article - it claims the Wii U has 1GB of memory, which has been demonstrated to be wrong by early teardowns that count 2GB. I'm definitely not going to discount it completely - it's got an actual source who's working with the hardware, after all - but it might not be completely true, based off early prototype hardware or something, maybe.
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Ah, that might explain things.
Although that only raises further questions, like "what the hell is the system doing to require a full gig of memory?"
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I'll also note that, if the rumors are right, it basically confirms my "half-generation" hypothesis, that Nintendo is deliberately designing their consoles to be half a generation behind Microsoft/Sony, so they get lower hardware costs, better thermal bounds, and can just follow the architecture of the "winning" console instead of risking a less established architecture, but are still "close enough" to the current-gen
Nintendo tried to go 'cutting edge' with the N64 and the Gamecube. That didn't work out so well, for whatever reason, so they aimed for 'fun' instead.
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It could very well be a POWER7-based design. Key word "based". Nobody (well, nobody with two brain cells) is saying they put a full POWER7 chip in the console.
But here's what they could have done:
Take a stock POWER7 chip. Strip it down to 4 cores - or maybe down to triple- or dual-core. Strip out some of the more redundant execution units (decimal float? four floating-point units?). Cut down on the massive cache. Cut out all the multi-socket stuff, the ECC support, trim down the memory controller to what a
All the complexity is inside the IC (Score:2)
Well, what do you expect with a system-on-a-chip? A modern high-volume consumer product should have one IC. That's the whole point of SOIC. It's a bit hard for phones, because they have all those radios that need some isolation, but a modern game console ought to have a very low parts count. Makes assembly very cheap, too.
That's what I would do (Score:2)
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Red means you're seeing the future.
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I (probably wrongly) smell a Virtual Boy [wikipedia.org] jab.
Re:PS3 (Score:4, Informative)
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My understanding is that it's a bit more powerful than either the 360 or PS3. This of course means it's less powerful than a high-end gaming PC, but that's to be expected for $300--of course, the Wii U has some features a PC won't, such as the whole tablet integration thing. The only thing I'm unsure of is audio processing. According to Wikipedia, it does 6-channel PCM; however, a review I read (CNET, I think) said that many games seem to be outputting in Dolby Pro Logic II. This is unfortunate if true.
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In terms of CPU, no. In terms of RAM and GPU, yes.
Re:PS3 (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a developer who's worked on the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the WiiU. The CPU on the WiiU has some nice things on it. But its not as powerful as the Xbox360 chip. I think N went to IBM and asked them: 'What's cheap to put on the chip?' and IBM said 'Well we have this sh*t that no-one wants.' and N said 'we'll take it.'. It does have better branch prediction than the PPCs in the PS3 and Xbox360.
The Espresso chip doesn't have any sort of vector processing. It does have paired singles, but that's a pain, a real pain to use. The floating point registers are 64 bit doubles, so when people talk about paired singles I assumed you split the register in two. No the registers are actually 96 bits wide, its actually a double and a single. To load it you have to load in your single, do a merge operation to move that single to the upper 32 bits, and load in your second one. This makes the stacks explode, because to save a floating point register in the callee takes three operations, and 12 bytes no matter what.
While the WiiU has 1 gig of RAM available to the game to use, the RAM is slow. The cache on the chip is also slow. We had tested out memory bandwidth between cache and main memory on the xbox360 and the WiiU. The main memory access on the Xbox360 is about 2x-4x times as fast as accesses the cache on the WiiU. Yes I mean that the external to the chip RAM on the Xbox360 is faster than the cache memory on the WiiU. I don't remember the full results but I think we figured out accessing the hard drive on the Xbox360 was faster than the RAM on the WiiU too.
The optical drive is also slow. I don't know for sure but it feels like the same drive that went into the PS3. And on the PS3 we used the hard drive to cache things to improve load speeds. Without a hard drive on the WiiU we can't do that.
I won't go into the OS, and the programming environment, but let me just say I hate programming for Windows, and I prefer programming on the Xbox360 to the WiiU.
While the GPU in the WiiU is better (probably because ATI doesn't make anything worse these days), they don't have the CPU and RAM to back it up. Who knows maybe things will be better from launch, but I'm glad to leave the WiiU behind.
Re:PS3 (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't remember the full results but I think we figured out accessing the hard drive on the Xbox360 was faster than the RAM on the WiiU too.
Forgive me if Im skeptical of an AC claiming that a company who has been creating consoles for 30+ years managed to make RAM slower than disk access. That would be basically impossible to pull off even if you were specifically trying to do so; theres about 3 orders of magnitude difference between the speed of the two.
Cache vs RAM is also a bit hard to believe, but at least there youre only talking one or two orders of magnitude.
Re:PS3 (Score:5, Interesting)
OP AC:
I used to code for Wii. Haven't coded for WiiU. So I cannot tell, only extrapolating from what you are saying here.
However, what you are giving as info is mostly the same than Wii used to have. I expected they kept full compatibility between the WiiU and the Wii, so they could emulate the system. That probably explains the chips.
Your PS (Paired Single) experience is mostly what I would expect from a newbie assembly programmer. Sorry. Yes, it's very hard to code PSes but once you get the hang of it, it's very efficient.
As far as your memory experience, I would expect the WiiU to use the equivalent from the Wii, meaning they have a very fast internal memory, and a cacheless external memory. It's powerful if you understand how to work its magic, and you need to know how to use caches or other accumulators to transfer data.
Not saying it isn't a pain. It is. Especially if you want to code as a general purpose guy (big company), with compatibility on multiple platforms. Most multiplatform have one kind of memory, so it expects fast and efficient RAM for its whole game. However, if you code solely for the WiiU, and have a background in Wii or in GameCube, you'll feel right at home I'm sure. Read your comments, and it all rang bells.
LordLimecat: :)
It would make sense if the WiiU uses the same system than the Wii. Wii uses 2 kind of RAM, first one is very quick for random access, but you have very little of it. Second one is very quick for sequential write access, but horribly slow for random read access. Depending on tests, you can get magnitude of slowness in that kind of RAM on Wii. Now, I don't have experience in WiiU (and even if I did, I would keep this confidential, to be honest), but I do feel in a familiar place.
-full disclosure- Work for EA, all info here was double-checked for availability in the likes of Wikipedia and Google. Opinions are mine.
Re:PS3 (Score:5, Funny)
I'm so sorry.
Re: (Score:3)
(Note: this is speculation, I never asked Nintendo about these, nor did I had any access to whatever internal documentation on RAM for the Wii - much less for WiiU)
Like I said, the 64M GDDR RAM of Wii is very quick, but optimized to be read and written in big chunks. It's not meant for per-byte random access.
I don't have the specifics at hand, but RAM is read in big chunks (32 bytes, 256 bytes, I really don't remember), and kept in cache from there. As long as you stay in that cache, it's all right.
Also, th
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I should fucking hope so. The XBOX 360 is seven years old.
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Wii U has a fucking POWER7 with 4 cores, the cpu alone is more powerful that the xbox 360
I have no doubt that nothing was cut from the version of the POWER7 that ships in $5k+ servers in the process of designing a $300 console...
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Incorrect. It's neither a quad core nor POWER7. It's basically a triple core version of what's in the Wii but clocked higher. Some developers have said that it's weaker than the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of CPU.
http://hothardware.com/News/IBM-Confirms-WII-U-Utilizes-PowerBased-CPU-Not-Power-7/ [hothardware.com]
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Well, somewhat the performance of the system does matter. Many game never got ported to the Wii from the xbox360 or the ps3 because the wii did not have enough power to support the game without a significant redesign of the engine and arts.
Re:It's the games, stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
The more grunt the system has, the harder it becomes to make effective use of that grunt.
It's ridiculously easy to make effective use of that grunt. It's trivial to bring a modern octocore 4 GPU SLI machine to its knees. The PS3 was hard to program for because it was a weird and non-standard hardware model that had poor development tools.
When you get right down to it: why does the CPU and GPU grunt under the hood matter? Only so they can power the graphics, physics, and AI effects of the games. Come up with a game that's fun to play, and people won't care how powerful the console is, as long as that game will run. We're seeing this play out in a major way on the iPhone and iPad.
Because graphics, physics and AI all make the game fun. How many game reviews have you heard complain about "stupid enemies".
The reason we had "monsters in corridors" games for so long was because that's all that we could render well. If you have more "grunt" at your disposal you can start creating more immersive and expansive worlds. Imagine Red Dead Redemption if you couldn't leave the canyon because nothing could render the rest of the world? Hardware enables new game-play capabilities.
There are certainly more gaming opportunities with 2D and other lightweight rendering technology but I remember being completely and utterly blown away by Zelda Ocarina of Time due to the leap into a 3D world with characters I could *see* and interact with.
As to the rise of tablets and cell phones... the GPUs and CPUs in a latest generation cell phone or tablet is nearly on par with an Xbox 360 if you are willing to sacrifice resolution. The latest PowerVR chipsets even support DX11.
And the publisher (Score:2)
Come up with a game that's fun to play, and people won't care how powerful the console is, as long as that game will run.
Just "a game that's fun to play" will get you nowhere. You also need an established publisher in order to get the game out of the PC ghetto.
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