I believe one of the dev kits did feature a Power 7 CPU but for some reason, Nintendo opted for the upgraded Broadway architecture. This would explain why IBM had to issue a "correction" because the engineers who posted the tweet probably weren't aware that the final hardware specs have changed, especially in regards to the CPU.

Don't blame 3Dude for that, as many of us believed the same based on the information given.

Also I wonder if perhaps backwards compatability played a part .. Could the Wii U Power 7 be fully compatible with Wii games and peripherals? That's for hardware experts to answer ..

A company cannot change the CPU with a few months notice, it would require a complete redesign of the mainboard, the dev tools etc.

Do NOT respond to me again and do NOT post a link to something you claim i dont understand when you have no clue what you are linking to. You have posted NOTHING that doesnt concrete what i have already said.

Fetching takes an instruction out of the instruction cache (which is massive in the wii u cpu) to be put in a stack to be executed, execute, EXECUTES THE INSTRUCTION, as long as this instruction remains in the instruction que it can be used over and over again with ridiculous speed.

Retire REMOVES an instruction from the que that is no longer needed to make room for something else.

Ivy bridge doesnt get six instructions per clock because ivybridge having 14 stage pipes, is piped deeper than the 750's 4 stages, so it can be clocked high.

This is also the reason why you will NEVER see a 2Ghz 750 until the process size reaches like, 18 nm.

There is no architecture in existance that can match the 750 at ipc at its power draw. The problem with the 750 is it cant be clocked higher.

In case you STILL havent figured it out there is a correlation between instruction pipeline stages, ipc, and clock frequency.

Odd how you have changed your tune. A few months ago there was no question in your mind but that the Wii U had a Power7 CPU and there was no way it would have a 3 core broadway based CPU- what has changed?(It's all there in the history). I will no longer argue technical points but younger members on the board should know to take everything you say with a unhealthy amount of salt.

heh heh... ha... ha ha HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!

Broadway retires 2 instructions a clock. fetches 4 from the instruction cache, and executes six. Oh, and most instructions are finished in ONE clock.

You are right, wii u may not do 18 ipc. Thats what an un upgraded broadway would do as a tricore. If anything espresso would be capable of more.

Why dont you follow your own advice, AND RETIRE YOUR MADE UP FICTION YOU PULLED OUT OF YOUR BUTT, and replace it with the REAL NUMBERS from the official broadway documentation ive actually ATTACHED to this board numerous times.


So what does the OFFICIAL documentation say about instructions executed?

No way six?

What have we learned?

You are been confused by terminology. Here is a decent blog posting that is worth a read.http://perilsofparal...rscalar-vs.html

Broadway retires 2 instructions a clock.

Which means it can finish 2 instructions per clock, which is what I was saying.

and executes six.

I cannot be sure what IBM mean by this but it's probably just the stages in the pipeline. Not even an ivybridge core can complete 6 instructions per clock.

Oh, and most instructions are finished in ONE clock.

Again this will be the instructions at the pipeline level. There is nothing special about that for a RISC chip. A CISC chip might take more than 1 clock to execute a single pipeline stage.

At a more basic level all you have to do is take a look at the CPU die size, and the systems power usage, and you will know it's not a very powerful CPU. It's a very cost/power usage efficient CPU but not all that powerful. The PS360 CPU's weren't very efficient but they massive were brute force monsters. When released the Xbox360 had a CPU of 176mm2 and a GPU of 182mm2(without eDram). The Wii U has a 32mm2 CPU and a 150mm2 GPU(alothough that probably includes a lot of eDram). This shows that Nintendo have put a lot more resources into the GPU than CPU which is fairly stand in this day and age but most games will be designed for CPU's with more power than the Wii U mainly because the PS360 generation had more powerful CPU's than they really should of had(most games run better on the Xbox due to it's better GPU- PS3 was way too CPU focused).

The wii u cpu rapes xenon, eats it, and craps it out brutally in every single category except one.

Xenon was a horrible horrible cpu.

One wii u core can execute as many instructions in a cycle as the ENTIRE 360 cpu.

360 can execute 1 instruction per thread, it has 2 threads a core, and 3 cores, thats six instructions a clock.

wii u gets six instructions a core (including 2 integers) and three cores for 18 instructions a
clock.

Thats not even getting into how short the wii u instriction pipelines are, and how stupid long xenons are, how awesome wii u's branch prediction is and how crap xenons is, How every single missed branch is a 500 cycle penalty, while wii u has a zero penalty 1st miss and a six cycle miss afterwards.

Can we stop with the fiction. The Wii U does not do 18 IPC, it does a bit more than 2. The Xenon does about 2 making it in theory about twice as fast as the Wii. However the Wii U CPU will get much closer to it's maximum potential due to been OoOE- common figure is about 1/3 faster- making the Wii U CPU about 2/3 as fast as the Xbox CPU.

Nothing interesting in there, and lots of wrong info. CPU/GPU are not on the same die, he is confusing SRAM with DRAM, he keeps stating random things increase the clockspeed of the CPU when what they really do is make the CPU more efficient, or take some of the burden away(GPGPU).

These CPU specs were taken whent the system was at IDLE in a menu.
Most PCs now a days will cut the CPU power down to save energy. As soon as you fire up a game or do something heavy on the PC the CPU will function at peak capactiy. I know this because my friend said his PC was advertised at having a 3.0 GHz processor. While at the Windows desktop it only showed 1.5 Ghz. As soon as we launched a game, i went to the desktop and checked again and it was at 3.0 GHz just as the box said it should be. I changed his power settings and bam it was always listed as 3.0GHz.

Ill wait untill Nintendo gives us the real story.

This isn't based on a modern CPU, it's very old tech so it might not have that hardware.
Also the Wii U draws very similar power when idle and gaming- Anandtech reported it to be 30w vs 33w. This could be the CPU throttling but why include hardware to do that to save a whole 3 watts?

I'm not a fanboy or a hater. I want this system to work because my son and I are eagerly awaiting Pikmin 3. This system makes me want to scream with rage over how SLOW it is! Seriously! I feel like I'm accessing the internet circa 1997 via the slowest dial-up connection in history. It takes FOREVER to even get into the Mii Maker! Takes FOREVER to create a new user and we keep getting errors every time we try to make/register a network ID - OMG! If my system is typical and not defective, I can't imagine ANYONE not being upset at the slowness of it. I'm used to clicking on something and it opening in a few seconds, not like 45 seconds or a minute in a half - or freezing completely!

That's just a software problem, it will be fixed.

The CPU is slow, that was confirmed once Nintendo release the picture last month of it's 30mm2 die. Strange decision by Nintendo as making the CPU 50% more powerful would of cost very very little. Nintendo will be able to making a lot of great games on the console but it won't be getting any 'next-gen' games.

IT's "cache," not "catch."

It's not stupid. It's not "so called." It was official confirmation. From IBMs Watson team. Guys who know.

Nothing has been publicly proven as fact other than IBM clearly stating the Wii U uses Power 7 chips from their official twitter public relations feed.

I don't believe IBM operates under the "fantasy" moniker.

As I mentioned earlier (and as anyone with eyes and a computer can see for themselves), IBM NEVER apologized. Because they didn't misrepresent anything. They realized they had been giving more detail than Nintendo wanted and reverted to official Nintendo terminology. A newer Twitter response clarified that all they are allowed to say is the info Nintendo released in June.

In case the memo was missed, the Wii U is no longer targeting a child (the "under 10 gamer") or casual only audience audience. This is a hardcore console for hardcore gamers and has been spec'd accordingly. Oh yeah. it will play kids games too. And Wii games for those who care about that. Those are called plusses, not minuses. Bonuses, not subtractions.

GX2 is an API. it can be used on any GPU capable of handling it. That's like saying the Wii U or the 720, PS4, 360, PS3 etc. are weak for using the Unity engine in any games. The Wii U far more than qualifies to run GX2 in addition to more modern and robust APIs. It's inclusion would definitely represent Wii backwards compatibility. Anything more is simply reading into what is not there.

No one is denying a PPC will work over an ARM chip (as will a custom P7). MS is likely to use ARM because they want to integrate with their vision for the future of Windows on PC, Phone, and Xbox. it makes cross platform much simpler if all you have to do is dial features back on some devices.

The actual processor core, though small and customized as it is, looks about right for a leaned out P7. This is not a Power 7 as we know it. Just as the 360 did not use a G5, but a custom derivative (otherwise the 360 would have been even bigger, with even more vents and gigantic turbines for fans, generating even more noise). Custom, lean, mean, purpose built CPU based on the Power 7 architecture. IBM even went so far as to state "custom Power 7" in one of their reveals. And they'd know the difference between that and "custom PPC 4xx."

For a multi-core custom Power7 chip to be 30mm2 would require the chip to be completely redesigned, so much so that it won't be anything like an Power7 chip.

THe 476fp core is 3.6 mm square. at Tricore, we are looking at about 11 mm square. Thats less than half the size of the cpu footprint shown in the picture, which you can easily compare to both the dimensions of the console handed out by Nintendo from the mother board shot, and the size of a human thumbnail from the up close shot. Either way you are looking at around 30mm square.

An 8 core power7 is 567mm2, yet each core is only ~30mm2. There is more to a CPU than just the core. Whatever the chip it's certainly going to be far more similar to an 476fp than a Power7, which isn't a bad thing. If you are going to use a low wattage CPU then it's better to use a one designed to be low power than stripping a high powered CPU- just look at Intel. They didn't just strip the Core architecture to make a Smartphone chip, they had to start from the ground up.

What does bug me a bit is why Nintendo were so conservative with the CPU. They could easily of stuck another core or 2 into that chip which would only increase the cost by a fraction but would of made the system much more balanced.

The 6/11 public announcement already gives it away.

45 nm process, only two chips IBM has are made on this process, power 7 is one of them.

IBM's special new edram technology. Only one chip IBM has uses this edram, in fact, its what made the chip possible, and thats power 7.

Power 7 8 core is a 562 mm square processor. We know its not 8 core, IBM's next lower end p7 base package is a half socket 4 core. 562/2=281

281 mm squared for a low end 4 core p7 base (uncustomized) package.

IBM is producing the wii u cpu's at their 300mm squared chip manufacturing plant.

The edram will not be used for the CPU, it will be used for the GPU. Beyond 2-3MB of cache is a waste for a gaming CPU, it's the GPU that will make the most use of the edram.

Also you seem to be confused by 300mm wafer. 300mm plant means that the wafer is 300mm in diameter, not that it produces chips that are around 300mm squared in size. The Wii U CPU will not anywhere near 281mm2. With the edram and GPU it might come to that.

LMFAO Chris Nay (guy on the official ibm twitter feed, who keeps confirming p7 over and over and over and over) Is one of ibm's lead research and communications engineers.

Its over kid.

Your crappy 476 processor isn't in the wiii u, thank god.

There is nothing wrong with a 476, especially a custom one.

One of the few things that we know about the Wii U hardware is that it consumes 45watts. Take away 10 watts for ram/mobo/disk drive and that leaves 35watts for the CPU/GPU. This will probably leave at most 10 watts for the CPU, or 3.33watts per core. Now an 8 core Power 7 chip uses 200-250watts, or 28watts per core. A 476 uses 1.6watts at 1.6Ghz. So either IBM scaled the 476 to be a bit more powerful, or scaled the the Power7 chip down massively(and probably made it more similar to 476 than a tradional Power7 chip).
So in the end we are probably going to see chip that is a mixture of both a 470 design and a Power7.

Mario and pikmin are whats gonna sell the wii u, much like previous Nintendo counsoles, then people will buy the 3rd party games for their superior graphics and use of the gamepad.
In conclusion Nintendo will be to blame for not making amazing exclusives that get people to go out and buy the u.

Mario 64 didn't sell the N64, Goldeneye did. All of Nintendo's big names failed to sell the GC. Pokemon carried the Gameboy for years and games like Brain training and Nintendo Dog's sold a lot of DS's. Wii Sports and Wii fit are really the games that sold the Wii. Nintendo will need the same again to sell a lot of Wii U's- something out of left field which they don't seem to have atm. However the problem with that is the people that buy those games aren't the same people that buy CoD, AC, Batman, ME3 etc. Nintendo also have a problem that most of the good 3rd party titles will already have been out before for other consoles which will really limit the market for most of the 1st round of 3rd party titles.

From what we have seen it's going to be a very hard sell for Nintendo.

Hardcore gamers will not buy the console as Nintendo has not given them a reason too. Casual gamers won't flock to it like they did with the Wii as the tablet controller is a lot less of a game changer than the Wii remote(even if in the end it wasn't that big of a change).

How about this as a candidate for the Wii U GPU?

http://www.amd.com/u...on-6800m.aspx#3

Zero. Powerful laptop GPU's that consume low power are expensive because they are rare. Not all chips are created equally and the best ones end up as high end GPU's/ CPU's.

I did try and warn ye some 6 months that the Wii U would be similar to the current consoles. One of the few things that we did learn last year was that the CPU was going to be 45nm based chip which told me that Nintendo weren't going to be very aggressive with the hardware. Nearly everything we have heard, and now seen from games at the E3, has pointed towards that.

What everway u look at this, its bad press for the wii u, and may even make people think its just gona be another underpowered console like the wii was. Im a nintendo fan and have a 3ds and wii and ive been really looking forward to hd nintendo gaming as well as being able to play games from devs that would have never entertained a nintendo console. Now i cant help feeling that as soon as the next box n ps4 comes out are we just going to be left with shovelware and more mario games as the devs will only be able to make big titles for consoles that can handle them. I hope its all bull crp but i hope nintendo really do want 3rd party devs making the top titles for wiiu, but the only way its gonna happpen is if this rumours not true. For the sake of an extra 50-100 pounds more is it worth cutting corners?

When you plan to sell ~50m units $50 a machine is MASSIVE. Not only that but a more powerful machine requires bigger budgets which is one of the reasons that the next gen won't be a massive step as dev's wouldn't be able to afford to make use of it.
I tried to warn ye months ago that Wii U wouldn't be anywhere near 3-5 times more powerful the PS360- it just wasn't going to happen.

Yeah, that's the point, it's PC BASED, not a PC GPU, they can customize it so that it doesn't melt.

Simple as that.

And that they do that making them slower. There are a few things they can do to increase performance per watt but it doesn't make a huge difference. At the high end the Wii U is looking at a 6670 spec chip which might be where that Xbox rumour came from.

Die size has nothing to do with how old the tech is Medu, the IBM Power 7 which the Wii U will be using a variation of will be 45nm, and that came out in 2010, not only that, although they may be similar, and I've lost count as to how many times I've said this in the forum. CONSOLES DON'T USE PC GPUs, the GPU will be small enough and the Wii U will be designed so the chipset doesn't overheat and melt.

Die size and process nodes are too totally different things. Every ~2 years we get a doubling of transistors for the same die space which cuts cost, or allows more complex chips OR chips that run at higher frequencies. The fact that Nintendo are using an outdated process node suggests that are not going to be very aggressive with the hardware in the Wii U.

The original Xbox used a PC GPU, as did the PS3- slightly altered but basically PC chips. Anyone that uses an AMD chip for the next gen will be using a PC based chip, or a chip design that will soon be used in a PC thereafter.

OP: Your figures are very wrong and based on speculation that is also very wrong.

If the Wii U does have a chip with similar HP to the 4870 then that would make it some 5 times faster. Also there is little chance that MS will use a 6670 in the next Xbox. The recently released 7770 would cost MS about $30 per chip and be 70% faster than a 6670- there is no way that a company with unlimited cash is going to go cheap on a GPU. Expect the next gen Xbox to use something similar to a 7850 which will be a a little slower than the current 6950.

Finally... it's unlikely that the Wii U will be as powerful as a 4870 due to the amount of heat it and a CPU required to run it would require. One of the only bits of solid info that we were given is that the CPU would be 45nm which is very very old tech, Intel were on 45nm 5 years ago. In most likely it will be 50% faster than the current Xbox.

There is nothing really new in these rumours. We have heard it a number of times now that the Wii U is between 1.5-2 times more powerful than the Xbox360. If people were expecting 50% and got 100% then it's faster than they thought.

The rumour that it's 5 times more powerful and only 20% slower than the next Xbox is worthless as however wrote it hasn't a clue about hardware. The 6670 is NOT 6 times faster than the Xbox 360, it's about 2.5 times. But again this figure would put the it right where many people have been predicting- ~2 times as fast as the current consoles.

I think that you could put ALL of the HUD onto the tablet and maybe an enemy radar!

I don't understand why people want the HUD on the controller. I don't want to take my eyes of the main screen to check my health or bullet count. Maps/Inventory on the controller make much more since. While I was playing Zelda SS I was constantly thinking to myself how much better this would be on the Wii U where I wouldn't have to be going into the map screen every few minutes. It's a simple change but it will make games flow better.

A more radically idea could be a Star Wars game. One player fly's the Millennium Falcon on the TV while the other uses the tablet as the turret- anyone that has seen the Tokyo car demo can imagine how well it could work.

There is also huge potential for FPS but I would need to have hands on experience to know if it could work correctly. One of the big problems with FPS on consoles is the ability to react quickly enough unlike on a PC where players can do 180 turns(or 360 if they like) in a blink of an eye. If the control is accurate enough then it could be used to simulate a mouse. This doesn't really have anything to do with the screen but it could be just as important.

Your figures are very wide of the mark.

The n64->GC was a MASSIVE leap. 10 times more RAM(and much faster), a CPU that was 10-20 more powerful and a GPU that was about 100 times more powerful(n64 could do about 150,000 textured poly the GC 15m). PS->PS2 was similar and the PS2->3 was about a 10-15 fold increase. The snes->n64 cant really be calculated because the snes was a 2D machine.

However your point will probably be proven correct but for other reasons- like diminishing returns on adding detail, cost of producing very detailed graphics makes it non-viable and the possibility that MS/Sony won't be as aggressive with their specs for those very reasons.

Wii U will not be competing with the PS360 consoles. For the love of god get that through your skull right now. We're not completely certain on the consoles capabilities, but enough points towards it being a arguably significant upgrade over the current HD consoles. The Wii U's competition isn't out yet nor are they in the public mindshare yet. No doubt Microsoft's and Sony's next consoles will be more powerful, but if your expecting truly night and day differences your going to be disappointed.

Of course it will be competing with the PS360- those are the consoles that it will be in direct competition with for at least the first ~12 months of it's life. Nearly all the 3rd party games that have been announced are PS360 ports(Darksiders II, Dirt, Batman, NG3 etc). The Dreamcast had to compete with the PS before the PS2 was released and struggled to make any inroads because of how competitively priced the PS was even though it was a great machine.

Reggie has also said it is not going to priced like the Wii was, so one of his statements (which have both been said) is wrong. We will have to find out when we are told the official price .

Here the source of my information: http://mynintendonew...igher-than-wii/

Well the current price of the Wii is $149 and Reggie has said it won't be around there- I think we all know that.

The CURRENT price of the PS3/Xbox is $249/$199, that could be down $50 at the end of the year, or including some games. I just don't see how Nintendo expect to have a successful launch of a console that is priced at $350-400 which will be competing against consoles that play the same games, barring a few Nintendo 1st party games, but cost 1/2 the price.

The Wii U could certainly struggle unless Nintendo have some VERY clever uses for the controller screen. There are lots of simple things that can be done on the screen to aid game-play but I can't see it having the instant appeal of the Wii remote. Helping to hide ideas in multi player would be an nice addition but it seems Nintendo didn't even design the console with that in mind.
The big worry I have for the Wii U is that there is no market left for Nintendo. They say they want to win back the hardcore gamers but why would someone with a 360 or PS3, or both, spend another $250-350, on another console to play PS360 ports? If it's someone that is upgrading from the Wii then they will probably have the choice of a $149 Xbox(or $200 with a couple of games) against a $250-350 machine so Nintendo won't even get all of those. Yes the hardcore Nintendo fans will buy it but if one looks at the sales of hardcore Nintendo games then there aren't many of us left- Zelda/Metroid games don't sell that well compared to triple A exclusives on other consoles.
Oddly enough I think the Wii U will fare better against the next gen consoles than the current ones as that should give Nintendo back it's price advantage and hopefully it will also continue to get multi platform games.

MorbidGod: As I said early IBM saying it used watson tech could of meant any number of things and it certainly doesn't limit it to a Power7 core.

Tenkay23: Your parts are far too powerful. A quadcore P7 chip consumes 100watts, as does a 4870 on 40nm(better known as a 5770). That's 200watts JUST from two chips, while the whole Wii used ~18watts.