3Dude

The lack of facts seems to be a license for some to predict a very high specification for the console but the leaks from developers indicate a console similar to current gen in performance. Yes they are only leaks but in the absense of developers saying the wii u will be many times more powerful than current gen it seems reasonable to expect something in line with those leaks. Again the CPU will need to be fully compatible with the original wii somehow as will the gpu. Its not sufficiently powerful to fully emulate the wii.

Consumers have already taught Nintendo by buying the original wii in such huge numbers that we aren't obsessed with performance and Nintendo like to make a good profit from their console. Its hardly going to be surprising to anyone if the wii u performance is towards the lower end of expectations especially in a time of recession.

I feel its a shame if the wii u does deliver current gen performance approx that many might be disappointed by this. I hope if this happens they will still consider buying a wii u. It looks to be a brilliant and imagnitive console and by supporting it we will get the Nintendo games we love like Zelda and Mario.

Whatever happens it will be massively superior to the original wii, a huge generational leap for Nintendo compared to the gamecube based wii.

Wii functionality isn't an issue.

The cpu is wii compatable, as they all have power pc instruction architecure (ppc/power isa 2.6) which is always compatable with previous versions.

The gpu is a programmable shader environment with tons more pipelines than the wii. Emulating fixed function is incredibly easy.... If you have direct access to the chips architecture (something homebrewers dont have access too.)

Lets face facts, both ps3 and 360 emulated backwards compatability at some point in the various skus, and neither one of those systems had compatable cpus with their predecessors, it would have been easier to emulate cube games for both systems (all power isa instruction cores). And neither ps2 nor xbox is really THAT far behind wii.

The big reason wii emulation requires highish specs (not so much anymore) is the same reason the ds emulators need highish specs to perform full speed. Poor optimization and emulation, because its all guesswork.

Thats also why we see regular performance increases regularly with updated versions of emulators.

Theirs also an issue with an instruction modern ppc versions stopped supporting that needs to be emulated, but when you know EXACTLY what it is, like nintendo does, its a non issue to emulate.

The other reason, is because unlike the ps2 or xbox, both cube and wii used an unconventional and unavailable to pc consumers ram type, mosys 1tsram. Even in small quantities, this ram has huge bandwidth, its something very difficult to emulate.... A luxery homebrewers don't have.

Wii u is likely to continue Nintendos use of exotic high performance ram somewhere (cube/wii 1tsram, 3ds fcram, wii u? (ibms new edram that performs like 6tsram?) and even if it didnt, we already know it has more than enough main memory (at minimum a GB) to make up for it, and unlike homebrewers, nintendo has the exact information to perfectly emulate the wii.

Its not even a question of whether or not its powerful enough to run the wii.

' not a traditional next-gen system in terms of a graphical leap, as Nintendo has chosen a different direction
- not sure yet if Wii U can handle his vision of Beyond Good and Evil 2'

2-3x 360/ps3 folks. Keep your expectations in check.

lol power 7 isn't a 120 watt processor.

The server and super computer packages with configurations of 8-32 cores are 120 watt+ packages.

Like ibm watson keeps saying over and over, its not the watson PACKAGE that's going into wii u, its the p7 chip.

the power 7 is a low power low heat processor. 8 power 7's run on the same amount of power, and fit in the same heat envelope as 2 power 6's.

a 4-chip power 7 package would halve power consumption and heat from the p6. a 2-core p7 would draw a quarter of the power, produce a quarter of the heat, and be clocked a GHz lower and outperform a p6 by 2x.

a custom package removing unneeded loads like unecessary memory controllers, I/O bus's to parts that don't exist in game consoles would drastically reduce power and heat even more, as wouod lowering clock to the confirmed 3GHz range.

right read the following THERE IS A ARTICLE ON THIS WEB SITE IN FACT A NUMBER OF ARTICLES ON THIS WEB SITE !!!!!!!!!!!!!! that clearly explain the wiiu cpu to you thanks to the never been wrong since 2003 wiiboy101 a guy who predicted the wiis motion and point and a guy who made a fortune in nintendo stock ,,,

he clearly stated 45nm and powerpc 476fp but not fp a broadway version of the same cpu family as 400 has totally replaced the near identicle powerpc 750 its clear to any sane person the following is the wii u cpu

3x core 3mb custom catch powerpc 32bit each core is like broadway in spec design and include the broadway graphics burst pipes each core is based on powerpc 32bit 400 series the most powerful single thread core cpu on this planet the cpu will support 3 x single tread out of order branch prediction multi tasking per core and the ability to virtual dual thread via a hyperthreading mode each core will operate at 5 instructions per clock

thank u and good morning

There is nothing near identical about the 400 series and the 750 series broadway is derived from.

'3x out of order branch prediction' is not a method of branch prediction, or anything in existance.

the 400 series, including the 476, the only chip in the series made on a 45nm process, can't be clocked high enough to be the wii u cpu.

There is no such thing as a 'catch'

If the wii u cpu was a 476 derivitive, ibm would be saying the wii u contained the same processor technology and chips found in the 476 blue gene, instead of the power 7 watson.

On three seperate occasions ibm's official ibmwatson twitter feed has directly confirmed power 7 chips in direct response to different people asking about it.

Absolutely not.

I have survived controller changes for generations upon generations. Dual analog has stagnated far longer than any other control scheme in history.

I'm sick of it, and will not have the first breath of fresh air in over 10 years taken away because some troglodytes can't figure out how to use it.

^ to answer question #1 here you go http://www.computera...a-quantum-leap/

Lol, a quantum leap is the smallest amount of movement physically possible.

wtf? lol.

This is stone age news. I can't believe this thread isn't locked. You had me jumping for joy until you said this news is a year old.

https://twitter.com/...241146213842944

Better?

Folks, its a custom power 7. No ifs ands or butts about it.

Its actually very simple with a little bit of debunking.

Typical Processors (Desktop or Notebook; Notebook-Desktop Hybrid Processors used in 7th gen to keep size down) are meant to clock at the fastest speed to handle less tasks than a server processor would need to with less cores.

A Server Processor typically has more cores (Sometimes a lot of Cores), and because it has so many, the clock speed can be lowered because there is already so much hardware working on the task.

Kind of confusing still, but hopefully you got the gist of it.

Think of it like
Cores = Workers
Clock Speed = Performance

Less Workers with Better Performance = Desktop / Notebook Processor
More workers with Lower Performance = Server Processor

Server Processors handle multitasking, and system performance and stability better though because they have more cores, and are not being "Over-Clocked."

The Power 7 Architecture typically has 4 to 256 Cores, and its a Server Processor, which has to handle a LOT of Tasks and keep the performance and stability ok.

Should the Wii U have a Power7 Architecture instead of PowerPC, would mean a HUGE leap in performance and it would be able to handle multi-tasking, etc. with a BREEZE. HOWEVER, they cost ALOT even with 4 Cores, so i can imagine PowerPC being the sweet spot.

Do people not understand power pc is dead?

Power 7 servers are 'expensive' though ibm actually uses its very affordable price for a high end server as an advertising bullet. Starting at $6,500 bucks, with some financing you could have a power 7 750 express for under 200 bucks a month, for about 36 months.

Not the power 7 processor itself. Its much, MUCH cheaper. Definately affordable.

However, power 7 is a SERIOUS departure in architecture for ibm.

The micro architecture was completely redesigned to take advantadge of the new edram technology, the entire core architecture has been repipelined from a high clock speed design to a power/performance focused design.

That means that the power 7 no longer falls into the same category of server processors.... It doesn't just get its power from more cores.

EACH CORE IN THE POWER 7 NETS OVER 2X GENERAL PERFORMANCE GAINS THAN A POWER 6 CORE CLOCKED A GHZ HIGHER.

It also uses less power, and makes less heat, and uses less memory (saves cost per core).

The entire architecture is made possible because of the new edram technology.

This is why its so easy to tell these rumours of tri core power pc with 3mb anonymous cache (some sources say its l2, which makes it more wrong, yet they say it uses power 7's ram technology, pointing to the 3mb as being what ibm mesnt by 'a lot of edram'.

Anyone who's even taken a glance at p7 wpuld be laughing their arse off at this point.

IBM increased the performance using their edram technology by REDUCING cache sizes.

Power 7's l1 cache is half the size of p6's at 32 kb. Since its the new embedded dram technology, bussed 8 ways, and acts like 6transistor sram (you thought mosys 1tsram was fast? this is 6t). And ibm was abble to lower the latency thanks to the reduced size to......

ZERO POINT FIVE NANO SECONDS.

That puts the memory bandwidth of power 7's 32kb of ram at 192 GB/s. at a core speed of 4GHz

Power 6s 64kb of edram has a latency of 0.8 ns.

So what would average person think would make a bigger difference? twice the ram, or 0.3ns less latency. The average person would always say double the ram.

But the p6 64kb l1 cache only gets 80GB/s.

I keep telling people, ram performance ain't about capacity.

What about l2? This is the one people claim is 3mb total. That is so wrong. That's as wrong as chocolate cheese.

P7 REDUCED its l2 cache by 16x!!!!

P7 has a 256kb l2 cache. Power 6 has a 4MB l2 cache.

This enables p7 to reduce latency to 2 ns for its l2 cache.

P6 has 5 ns latency. The results?

p7's 256kb l2 cache has a 256GB/s bandwidth per core at 4GHz..... While p6's 4MB l2 cache only gets a 160GB/s bandwidth at 5GHz.

Power and performance is not about more ram, and its not about clock speed.

Now, anyone who has been following these rumours should have one thing on their nind right now.

Hey 3dude, ibm said the wii u would use the same technology as power 7, they SPECIFICALLY said, and I quote 'lots of edram'.

At 4 cores, all those caches combined barely make a single MB. That's NOT 'lots of edram'.

You are absolutely correct. Although the performance is fantastic (and linearly scalable to clock speed) 1MB is most certainly NOT a lot of edram.

How about 32MB edram embedded on the actual die? Yeah, that's the ticket.

The final huge change Ibm made with memory architecture is that l3 cache is no longer put on a seperate chip placed next to the cpu.

Its been EMBEDDED ON THE DIE ITSELF SMACK DAB THE MIDDLE OF THE DIE RIGHT BETWEEN THE CORES.

So what does that do for performance?

Well p6 ALSO has a 32MB cache.... Lets compare.

P7 is set up so each core has up to 4MB l3 directly adjacent to it. Now, all cores CAN share the entirety of the pool. So, a single socket of p7 has 8 cores, with 4Mb l3 per core at 8 cores, for a total of 32MB.

That enabled Ibm to get latency down to 30ns for its l3 cache.

P6 had its l3 cache on a seperate chip. 32MB on it. This gave p6 a l3 latency of 35ns. How much of a difference did that 5ns make?

P6 gets 80GB/s for its l3 cache, shared between 2 cores, at 5GHz.

P7. l3 cache gets FIVE HUNDRED AND TWELVE GB/s shared by 8 cores at 4GHz.

Of course, if you only have 4 cores, that's 16MB for a bandwidth of 203 GB/s.

Power7's edram technology IS power 7. They are one and the same. You can't just use power 7's edram technology and NOT have a p7 architecture.

Wii u HAS power7, NOT power pc.

Power 7 gets better performance at a lower clock speed than power pc.

Power 7 gets better performance at lower temperatures than power pc.

Power 7 gets better performance at less power draw than power pc.

Plus, power pc is dead as a frontline processor. Died in 2005/2006 when Ibm lost the power mac contract.

Power 7 IS in wii u, its been confirmed, explicitely word for word by official ibm news feed.

Looking at the Power 7 wiki page it says it has 4 megabytes of cache per core but wii u is claimed to have 3 megabytes of cache memory with 2 megabytes for one core and 1/2 megabyte for the other 2.  Surely either a cutdown specification or its using a different cpu architecture. I'd like to think it was a Power 7 single core as the main cpu core with less cache and with 2 side cpus that match speeded up wii cpu's. I wonder if the Power 7 is 4x as powerful by mhz as the wii cpu if so this would make sense allowing for the primary cpu having 4x as much cache. Its an idea anyway.

That information is erroneous (or misinterpereted) according to my documentation.

It sounds like they confused the l3 local cache, which actually combines to make the l3 cache shared by all cores (its connected to every core in a strip that goes through the middle of the chip) that's up to 4MB for every section the length of the core confused with the l1/l2 cache that's in each core.

Configuration: IBM Power 730 Express server: POWER7 cpu, 3.55 GHz, 2 sockets (8 cores per socket, 16-cores total, 64-threads total), one Memory Controller per socket, 64 GB RDIMM DDR3 (Registered DDR3-1066 CL7).
567 mm2, 45nm, 11 layers, Cu, SOI, eDRAM, 1.2 B transistors


L1 Data cache = 32 KB, 128 B/line, 8-WAY, store-through, EA index, 2 reads + 1 write every cycle


L1 Instruction cache = 32 KB, 128 B/line, 4-WAY

L2 cache = 256 KB per core, 128 B/line, 8-WAY, Store-In

L3 local cache (Fast-L3 Region cache) = up to 4 MB (eDRAM), 128 B/line, Policy: Partial Victim

L3 cache = 32 MB per chip (eDRAM) consist of LOCAL-L3 from another cores, 128 B/line, (maybe sends 2 lines for read request). Policy: Adaptive victim

Now, I'm NOT saying THIS power 7 configuration is going into wii u. That's silly.

But even on this big boy, you can see the real l-1-2-3 caches.... You ain't getting 4big ones per core in the sense of it being IN the core like the l1/2 cache.

cdn.arstechnica.net/power7_ars.jpg

You can literally see the l3 memory just outside the core, adjacent to the l2 cache.

Yeah, just looked up wiki, and the wording is a little misleading, making it seem like the l3 is INSIDE each core, which isn't the case.

Seems to me like somewhere down the line some folks are getting their caches mixed up.

Just found your sourcing man.

wiiudaily.com/wii-u-system-specs/

this looks like doo doo. Power pc is a major red flag off the get go, and then these caches are incredibly suspicious, am I to seriously believe there is only one cache per chip and no l3 connected to I/o and memory controllers linking all the cores?

pretty stinky.

You aren't going to want to hear this.... But that's the way the truth usually is.

Twilight princess uses a modified version of the windwaker engine.....

As does skyward sword, which uses a modified version of the twilight princess engine (which was the wind waker engine).

Skyward sword absolutely demolishes twilight princess in graphical fidelity and general power flexing

From poly counts, to simultaneous ai scriptings, to environment enteractivity, to texture layers, texture resolution, lighting, physics, animation articulation (particularly facial articulation, which was pretty bad in tp) skyward sword stomps tp in every category.

What you seem hung up on is the art style, not the graphical capabilities.

Personally, I disagree that a tp art style using ss graphical improvements would have been better.

I felt tp was a very forced, very weak art style. Since it was a forced 'darker' art style, it had very little contrast in its visuals. When things actually got dark, tp's visual tone didn't change much.

When ww or ss decided it was time to show some dark imagery, the contrast was palpable.

Its hard to imagine anything outselling the wii.

It really depends on your definition of only slightly more powerful.

The cold hard truth ofbthe matter is, with the size of the case, knowledge from confirmed respected devs, and hands on with official devkits....

The wii U IS only going to be a little more powerful than 360/ps3....

The ballpark seems to be around 2-3x.

Compare that to the 40-50x jump between ps2-ps3.

Of course, the important thing to realize is.... 720 and ps4 are looking to be doing the same thing.

Confirmed Durango alpha kits put the system at only 5-6x more powerful than the 360.

Again, I bring up the 40-50x jump between xbox/ps2 and 360/ps3.

cf. Pikmin 2

Oh and MH3's physics were awesome.

Monster hunter 3 huh.

I take it you are referring the extremely rare phenomenon of jiggle physics in a video game being used on something other than breasts.

High memory bandwidth was the main good feature of gamecube for its time, its about the only area it excelled above the original xbox. I don't remember any GC or wii games with a good physics engine like something like Half LIfe 2 on original xbox. In that game you could interact and throw, drop, push objects around you and they would act in a realistic way, they had their own gravity effects etc and vibration or explosions could move them. Quite an achievement for the original xbox and not something I've ever encountered on gamecube or wii in a similar way.

Nintendos licensed havok since the gamecube. Though they dont typically use it in its traditional fashion, but tweaked the settings on the engine to all kinds of cartoony levels, see smash bros brawl.

On gamecube, the game gheist used the havok physics engine in a realistic manner like hl2.

Was particularly fun when going into slow mo ghost mode after setting off a chain reaction of explosions and just watching all the debris and guards floating around, especially when the breakable doors blow apart peice by peice.

Like on the xbox, when too many objects are set in motion they are removed at random.

Wii has elebits, which absolutely rapes anything on the xbox, with several hundreds and possibly thousands of simultaneously animated physics routines. Everything from desk pens to the house itself can be picked up and manipulated. Level editor was a popular physics playground for a while.

3ds can run havok, and a splinter cell game does, but looks like poo poo. Havok stated their engine is not a good fit for the 3ds, as it doesnt leave a lot of room for the overhead of auxilerry middle ware like havok.

Proprietary in game physics engines seem to be much more viable on the 3ds, as shown by luigis mansion.

Mario galaxy had a very sophisticated heavily customized havok physics engine, as havok was not designed to support such.... imaginative uses of gravity. Gamecube could.not.perform galaxies physics.

I wouldnt say the wii had fantastic physics, really all things considered it had crap physics compared to what its contemporary consoles were capable of....

Yet... Bizarrely.... The wii often had.some.of.the.smartest, most impressive uses of physics systems, emulating a dmm like physics dependant ai routine that the other systems were not only capable of, but to a much better resolution.... Yet just didnt make.much use of, and when they did it was purely cosmetic.

Something i found most frusterating to be honest.

First use was in wii sports, one of the tennis minigames that had targets on a brick wall. The targets would shatter according to point of impact of the ball, with the broken peices being made on the fly according to collision data, instead of pre drawn.

Excite truck made fantastic use of tesselation, deformation mapping, and real time.physics, as truck destruction damaged trucks in real time according to variables like the size and shape.of the impacting object, direction of travel, velocity, point of impact.

Trucks could be observed crumpling like a tin can in real time, and with smooth animation. An amusing glitch would be to pause a replay directly after an impact. The impact data has already been calculated, and it gets applied even though the game is paused, so you get to watch the car magically crumple.

Thanks to the sophisticated damage engine, The impacts are quite accurate to what causes them. If you smash into a tree, youll.find a dent the size and shape.of the tree. When a coconut from said tree.falls on top of your truck, it leaves a little coconut sized dent.

No crash was ever the same in the original excite truck. (excite bots got rid of this awesome damage system)

Which made it all the more frusterating to look at motorstorm and its psx era damage system of pre made asset swapping.

sports resort combined Nintendos proprietary dmm solution with physics data to allow players to carve objects up with swords in any manner they desired in the quick slice mini game.

This concept was the core foundation of skyward swords gameplay. Even just random slicing of reeds made a little game of physics and dmm, if you could keep the reed balanced while slicing it down to the glowy part you got rupees.

Frusteratingly, Ive found the use of physics in game to have, for some reason, be relegated to nothing more than eye candy post hl2.... With precious few games doing more than cosmetics...

And the ones that did the most with it... Had by FAR the least ability to do it.  WTF?

Almost as frusterating a dissa
pointment as only having two full scale scale (ie not minigame) games out of an entire system library make proper use of motion controls.

Man this gen was a dissapointment.

This guy seems to think retro and ead's art style is so great that simply making games like galaxy and the primes HD will make them look better than most games that came out this gen.

As asinine as that assertation is at first glance....

Hes right.

Uncharted is not indictive of most games this gen. Gears of war is not indictive of most games this gen....

Like every gen, in every genre, and every entertainment medium.... 90% of whats on the market sucks.

Yeah, the primes and galaxy can best mediocrity on more powerful platforms.

That being said Shin en most definately has a handle on making good graphics... And the information he let loose on what his engine is actually doing is HUGE.

The current leak squad of the v4 devkit cites a more than decent gpgpu offsetting a stripped down low clocked cpu (offset by seperate i/o controllers and dsp for sound)....

Which would enable impressive graphics but rather limiting gameplay as its typically the cpu that determines how much you can have going on at the same time.

The current wii u armeggeddon on gaf is that the cpu is going be a huge bottleneck holding the system back with the gpu needing to use its general purpose capabilities to bail it out.

So, everybody is screaming and crying about things like sub 360/ps3 physics and other weak cpu woes.....

Despite things like havok announcing wii u support of their latest and most advanced physics applications (AND SPECIFICALLY STATED CPU RAN PHYSICS) As well as the complete vision 8 engine.

And the fact the cube had a 2x increase in cpu power from the second to last devkit to the final devkit.....

The wiiu is doomed because of its weak cpu in its v3/4 devkit, so it specifically means it cant do what Shin en says their engine is doing.

This would be great news. Too bad its coming from a named person from a dev house known for good graphics.

If it was an anonymous source the wii u would be saved.