a lot more cache/core, it no doubt has additional and more modern instructions. I can't help but wonder if they are using a stronger FPU or have updated the SIMD logic at all.

Heh, if they had gone with the 476's they could had said it was blue gene technology instead of watson.

I think the Power 7 core makes even less sense.

I've got some research to do on the PPC line. I know AMD core modules don't exactly deliver on IPC, maybe that was fixed with Jaguar.

so devs dont even have info. supports working on the GPU/CPU desing all the way up to the last second. im beginning to wonder if nintendo is trying to make there games look bad, to set a low bar for early games next to other consuls, then all of a sudden BAM, we lied. there is some support but it is still a out-there theory.

no CPU die shots yet... how?

I wonder why no one else has thought of the obvious reasons they might have intentionally withheld serious specifications.  To keep the competition in the dark!  Durango leaked specs with 8GB of ram, then the rumor mill starts churning out claims that Sony is upping the RAM to stay competitive.  No one can leak Nintendo info if very few people have it.  I think the negative press it is getting is a result of not working with the videogaming media, they are peeved at Nintendo for keeping them in the dark because they feel entitled to every little detail.

Now that the competition's specs have been finalized (once they are confirmed to be so) I expect Nintendo to come out with all of the information they have on the hardware.  If I were them, I would keep it away from VG media as much as possible, and let what the devs are able to do with the system provide all the evidence needed of it's potential.

The only other reason I can think of is they gave all the information they themselves had at the time, given the highly customized nature of the architecture and the lack of comparable chips or code to baseline performance on, I wouldn't doubt this either.  It seems they only finalized the hardware within several months of the launch, and in that time their own dev groups had to figure out what they had to work with.

No CPU shots yet, they are forthcoming.

What is Wii U's bandwidth now with this GPU info when not relying on eDram? Just wondering if the 12.8 GB from anandtech is correct or not.

12.8GB/s for the DDR3, Anandtech had no info on the 140GB/s EDRAM in the GPU.  Wii U definitely has the most complicated, and the most tightly designed memory architecture out of all of the 8th gen consoles.

But so, how much the ps4 and new xbox will be better? the difference can be a wii vs 360/ps3? a psone vs n64? a dreamcast vs ps2, a dreamcast vs gamecube or xbox, or ps2 vs xbox.. i mean, where wii u can fit in a comparison like these? Is there any sure about the other specs?

They're better specwise, but not much. How that will translate into games, we won't know until we know.

thats why I gave u the last link... they seperate them to AMD and ATI (5xxx and backwrds)

Interesting. I've said multiple times here that i think that its the e6760. It fits the process, the power profile, the performance profile, everything. Because no one has a die shot of a e6760 we can't know for sure, but it's pretty clear none of the r700 series cards really fit the bill.

Because it looks like it'd be too complex to explain how the Wii U running at a low clock can perform so well. It'd be easier to show people a visual example, or have a piece of demo software running on Unreal 4 or something like that. It's a simple and easier way to explain specs rather than raw numbers

Honestly I don't think they really know exactly what the specs are.

why don't Nintendo just come out with the specs.

I have no idea.  Then again, because their design strategy doesn't focus on raw power, it wouldn't be in their best interest to do that.

A TFLOP at 550Mhz?! Madness....

Yeah that isn't the actual number, it was just mentioned that it performs that way, when the features of the GPU are put to good use.  You can only really calculate flops based on programmable shaders, unless you know exactly what's going on in the rest of the logic, and that would put us somewhere in the 500GFLOP range based on what we know about the E6760.  Because it has one less SIMD engine than a stock E6760 and that GPU comes in at 576GFLOPS stock 

Ok BUT can anyone accurately to close to accurately predict the Specs of the Wii U and compare it to what the PS360 can do, and compare it on what the PS4 can do.

 

It's obvious the PS4 will be able to do more, but how much more? I know the gap is apparently small, but how much smaller? I'm not trying to bash the GPU in the Wii U I'm actually trying to do the opposite, but without much effect heh

 

The GPGPU is able to do stuff the CPU used to do in current gen consoles. Does this mean the CPU in the Wii U uses it's cores for the gamepad and OS instead? 

we are in diminishing returns territory, meaning that more polygons =/= better looking graphics.  The gap is small already, and once you take into account that the increased performance isn't going to mean better graphics it becomes even smaller.  PS4 will still win out performance wise, and we'll likely see games toward the end of the gen that run smoother on that console than on Wii U, and maybe some that look marginally better, though not enough to change the experience.

So can anyone calculate the specs if an E6760 was under-clocked by 50hz and used DDR3 RAM instead of GDDR5 RAM?

Well, E6760 doesn't come with 32MB of SRAM on the die, so the memory bandwidth and latency are just about as good as you can get.  DDR3 can pool resources just fine, and the SRAM is about the fastest RAM in existence and will be doing the majority of swaps with mem2.

 

Memory bandwidth aside, I've already laid out what we're looking at strictly from the programmable shaders power wise.  We can't know or calclate what the dedicated silicon is doing.  bgassassin on neogaf still thinks its performance will be equivalent to just over 1TFLOP when accounting for fixed functions, dedicated silicon, shaders, etc based on his industry source. 

99% of ps360 games are cpu intensive... also wii U can boost its performance on cpu, with a bit different coding, but all games are ports... so wii U struggles with the 360 codding.. thats all.

If u add wii U codding on 360, 360 will not be able to perform also.

Exactly, thanks for the clarification, sometimes I ramble, lol

and no, no die shots yet. Four Storm doesn't want to be a pest with ChipWorks considering what they've given the community so far.

well i expect gc/xbox like gen 3 rd parties similar or better along with consul preformance. if ps4 flops as a inefficient steroids engine again then a even better match. think the GPU is ruffly even with RV770 main parts. but can be pushed alot more do to on die ram and custom parts to unload alot of work, hopefully leaving the main parts the basic build and custom on making it look nice. id design wii BC parts cabable of runnning with wiiu and not exclusivly wii. expect most games below par to 720/ps4 but some high end games at their upper limmit

I really think when it comes to actual visuals for games actually built for each of the next gen consoles, we'd be hard pressed to find any sizeable difference between the three. Sure Orbis and Durango are FLOPS monsters, but I doubt seriously either will be able to reach anywhere near peak, Orbis will have a harder time with it than Durango I think. I really think that all three systems give devs plenty of room to express themselves artistically, and all will have the ability to display some impressive stuff. Hell we've already seen some impressive stuff done on Wii U. Maybe it starts to show it's weaknesses at the end of the gen, but not most of it, and certainly not early on.

Looks like AMD changed all of the nomenclature. Each SIMD has 16 SP's, each SP has 5 processing elements, if they are using evergreen SIMD cores that would be 8 (that we know of) simd cores with a total of 640 processing elements.e6760 only has 6 SIMD cores and 480 PEs.

That would put it at 352 GFLOPS which doesn't make sense to me because the same calculation would cut the e6760 GFLOPS from 576 to ~288 (did it a minute ago, can't remember exact number)

Does SIMD width come into the calculation at all? What am I missing here?

I'll have to look at that a little later, have to head home from work.

So you don't account for the number of SP's per SIMD core?

So it isnt based on VLIW at all then? Do we know for sure AMD provided them or is that speculation? That would change the conversation drastically I think because everyone is assuming that the 8 clearly visible SPU's are based on VLIW5.

R700 is still ATI branded! So i dont think its R700 at all! Its custom, but SPUs can be older with 20 ALUs on SPU, so we get a nuber of 160 spus @ 550MHz is 176 gflops.

Right, if it was based on R700 it would carry ATi branding as well. Going on the assumption that this chip is completely custom then really anything is possible. The consensus at the moment is 40 ALUs/SPU for 320 SPUs @ 352GFLOPS.

e6760 has 480 sp's @600MHz. You think they just used the SPU's from that chip and customized everything else?

It's not a R600 series GPU.

Like I said, it may have started as one during the first stages of development but now its a completely different thing, tailor-made for Nintendo's needs.

I wouldn't think so either, and though marcan doesn't think so Hollywood was widely rumored to be based on R600 given the die size, layout, and capability. If indeed Hollywood was based on R600 then wouldn't it make sense to include the driver modules to allow for emulation?

He seems to think Hollywood is quite literally GX with a higher clock speed, which doesn't seem plausible to me given all of the other known quantities.

They are trying anything to try and trash the part. Sad, because talking about it's power potential is much more exciting.

So BGAssassin still thinks we're looking at around 1TF or more taking "dedicated solicon" into account. He wouldn't label it fixed function, though that's what I would suppose that amounts to. Very interesting post.

I'll have to give them a try. As long as they support CX.

UE4 is made with nVidia GPUs in mind, almost all special effects are nVidia GPU exclusive ones, made possible by physix and cuda cores technology. All next gen consoles have AMD GPUs, so UE4 wont run in its full glory on any console!

P.S. I am AMD user, so no eye candy for me on my PC!

I'm an AMD user as well, so I guess I'm out as well. I need to get rid of my 6870's, slightly disappointed in them.

epic came out and said wiiU can run unreal4, but not to the max they wanted it, without optimization atleast. but then again 720/PS4 have confirmed themselfs to run gimped versions of UE4 too.

Awesome, thanks! I hadn't heard that yet. UE4 won't see full implementation on any console I'm sure. It's a PC first engine, and I'm glad they built it that way.

http://www.neogaf.co...&postcount=1663

*Comes out of his hole (again)*

I tend to forget some people take this stuff a lot more serious than I do.

First a thanks to Chipworks for going above and beyond for the picture and to blu, Durante, Fourth Storm, Thraktor, and wsippel for the work they did. Shinjohn let me know that the picture had been obtained and sent me a link, but I also checked out the thread. I wanted to come back and help with the confusion and what not.

As some of you know getting info about the hardware was a pain because what Nintendo released essentially boiled down to a features list. And by that I mean general features of a modern GPU that could easily be looked up. Info that dealt with performance apparently was not given out leaving devs to figure have to figure it out on their own. I had two working ideas of the GPU based on a more traditional design (which I was hoping for) and a non-traditional design. I see that some of you actually remembered the non-traditional idea. Wsippel and I would compare notes on whatever info we could come up with. Some of those notes led us to come up with how it may look if Nintendo took the non-traditional route.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...ostcount=12053

In this post you’ll see both wsippel’s take and my take. I’m going to address some things in that post because I know some of you will try to take them out of context. First you’ll see wsippel’s baseline ended up being more accurate than mine. When I talked about the potential performance of 1TF or more that was in comparison to the R700 series because new GPUs are more efficient than that line, a higher baseline, and my idea focused on the dedicated silicon handling other performance tasks.

So what was the basis for the non-traditional view? I shared two of those bits of info before.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=6136



Quote:
Well, I can't reveal too much. The performance target is still more or less the same as the last review from around E3. Now it's more balanced and "2012" now that it's nearer to complete and now AMD is providing proper stuff. As far as specs, I don't see any big change for better or worse, other than said cost/performance balance tweaks... It won't make a significant difference to the end user. As far as the kit goes, it's almost like what MS went through. Except more Japanese-ish... If you know what I mean. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=6305



Quote:
Anyway, things are shaping up now with the new year. There was some anxiety with some less close third parties about what they were doing with GPU side, whether things were going to be left in the past... but it looks more modern now. You know, there simply wasn't actual U GPU data in third party hands this time last year, just the target range and R700 reference GPU for porting 360 titles to the new cafe control. Maybe now they finally can get to start debugging of the specifics and start showing a difference... Here is one more specific piece that I didn’t fully share.



Quote:
I can't confirm or deny, sorry. The cat is very confidential and I repeat non-final. The target, last checked, is triple core with XX eDram and exclusive Nintendo instructions. 1080/30 capable Radeon HD w/tess. and exclusive Nintendo patented features. On a nice, tight bus that MS wishes they had on 360.
I appreciate the individual for sharing as much as he did. He was a little paranoid though (I can understand) and at one point thought I was leaking info on a messageboard under a different name, but wouldn’t tell me the board or the username, lol.

I’m sure some of you remember me talking about games being 720p. It’s because with this I knew devs would use those resources for 720p development. I’m sure some of you also remember me mentioning the bus. The key thing in this is the “Nintendo patented features”. In the context of things we talked about, it seemed to me these were going to be hardwired features. What is certain for now is that the die shot shows a design that is not traditional, fewer ALUs (in number) from where things supposedly started with the first kit, and GPU logic that is unaccounted for. I’ve seen some saying fixed functions, but that’s too specific to be accurate right now. Dedicated silicon would be a better alternative to use, though I say that as a suggestion. In my opinion I think lighting is a part of this. The Zelda and Bird demos emphasized this. Also in the past it was discussed how Nintendo likes predictability of performance. It would also suggest Nintendo wasn’t ready to embrace a “fully” programmable GPU and kept on the water wings when jumping in the pool.

I did what I could to get as much info on the hardware as possible since Nintendo was giving out so little. From there I gave the best speculation I could based on that info. As of today, I still stand by the evaluations I made about Wii U’s potential performance from all the info I could gather. And until Nintendo’s games show otherwise I’ll continue to stand by them because in the end it’s on Nintendo show what Wii U is capable of.

And if you think I deserve flak for what I’ve said in the past then I’m here, but you’re wasting your time trying because my view hasn’t changed yet.

I made the farewell post to hold myself accountable to avoid posting, but I haven’t done well sticking to that, haha. I wasn’t going to make this post, but since I was one of the primary ones gathering info it’s unfair to you guys to leave things as they were.

Current count I think leaves 16 of the blocks unexplained on the chip, thraktor believes asymmetric SPU's is a strong possibility considering the number of repeating groups of logic units that can't be readily explained.  Looks like ~30-50% of the chip is unaccounted for so far.  This thing could be a closet beast for all we know, and with the memory structure they are using they should be able to get much closer to whatever theorietical peak it has than anything we've ever seen before.