45 replies to this topic

[Meelow100]

This video should be posted everywhere so people will understand that stupid rumor is fake.

[Hank Hill]

"Unannounced Specs explained in complete detail" is what I read there.

Seriously...forget trying to win people over to the fact that the Wii U will 'beat' the PS360, and just stop already. We know absolutely NOTHING about the specs of the Wii U, and to be honest, I'm quite sick and tired of reading about the constant banter back and forth on this.

Edited by GameCollector, 05 April 2012 - 10:53 AM.

[Meelow100]

"Unannounced Specs explained in complete detail" is what I read there.

Seriously...forget trying to win people over to the fact that the Wii U will 'beat' the PS360, and just stop already. We know absolutely NOTHING about the specs of the Wii U, and to be honest, I'm quite sick and tired of reading about the constant banter back and forth on this.

We know it will use Radeon in the Wii U, and the Wii U will beat the 360/PS3 in power.

[Hank Hill]

We know it will use Radeon in the Wii U, and the Wii U will beat the 360/PS3 in power.

We don't actually KNOW for sure it'll beat anything. Having a Radeon card doesn't automatically mean it'll be better.

Can't we just drop all of this crap until E3, and get back to actually talking about games, instead of a boatload of crappy rumors all about the exact same thing?

[Meelow100]

We don't actually KNOW for sure it'll beat anything. Having a Radeon card doesn't automatically mean it'll be better.

Can't we just drop all of this crap until E3, and get back to actually talking about games, instead of a boatload of crappy rumors all about the exact same thing?

Why does everyone find it hard to believe that 2011-2012 tech will be 2005-2006 tech?, the 360/PS3 are weak now.

[Hank Hill]

Why does everyone find it hard to believe that 2011-2012 tech will be 2005-2006 tech?, the 360/PS3 are weak now.

Didn't say I don't expect it to be more powerful.

What I did say is that I'm rather tired of all the constant talk back and forth about it. I haven't seen anybody make a thread about anything CONFIRMED in a long time. Just a ton of back-and-forth rumors and rumored specs.

[Meelow100]

Didn't say I don't expect it to be more powerful.

What I did say is that I'm rather tired of all the constant talk back and forth about it. I haven't seen anybody make a thread about anything CONFIRMED in a long time. Just a ton of back-and-forth rumors and rumored specs.

I posted this to destroy that stupid rumor once and for all, do you think I like these rumors?, every single Xbox 720 rumor that came out makes it sound horrible and the PS4 rumor says it won't support used games, I can't wait till E3.

[Caius Casshern Sins]

Lets just drop this for a while until e3, we are all tired with the rumors of the Wii U power so lets not say anything about it. All rumors can be considered false until REAL proof comes out. Also with e3, we can actually see the performance for ourselves.

[Hank Hill]

I posted this to destroy that stupid rumor once and for all, do you think I like these rumors?, every single Xbox 720 rumor that came out makes it sound horrible and the PS4 rumor says it won't support used games, I can't wait till E3.

Posting it here won't do much of any good. Just about everybody here dismissed that rumor as trollbait. Where you need to be is NeoGAF and other forums.

I guess what I'm really tired of are threads about this popping up like weeds on this site, and less discussion about...just about anything else, really.

Edited by GameCollector, 05 April 2012 - 11:07 AM.

[Meelow100]

Posting it here won't do much of any good. Just about everybody here dismissed that rumor as trollbait. Where you need to be is NeoGAF and other forums.

I would but my account is not actvated yet (I sighned up on March 14th) on NeoGAF.

[Nollog]

Didn't say I don't expect it to be more powerful.

What I did say is that I'm rather tired of all the constant talk back and forth about it. I haven't seen anybody make a thread about anything CONFIRMED in a long time. Just a ton of back-and-forth rumors and rumored specs.

I agree with what you're saying, but to be clear.

The CPU is confirmed to be an IBM.
The GPU is confirmed to be an AMD(ATI to old people like me).

People do often forget the R700 thing was an IGN sourced rumour.
It's not been confirmed.
In fact, AMD have said it's NOT based on ANY single generation of chip they've made. It's completely custom, building on the years of experience they have.

[Gameboysoadvance]

This video should be posted everywhere so people will understand that stupid rumor is fake.

Very good. You had to be searching all night for detailed proof like myself. I don't know how I missed it. Great post.

[Meelow100]

Very good. You had to be searching all night for detailed proof like myself. I don't know how I missed it. Great post.

I found it very fast actully.

[Nin_Stream]

LOL nice. But people need to realize that a new gen system HAS NEVER BEEN WEAKER THEN THE PAST GEN SYSTEMS!!! That wont start now lol.

[Robotic Sunshine Commander]

Didn't say I don't expect it to be more powerful.

What I did say is that I'm rather tired of all the constant talk back and forth about it. I haven't seen anybody make a thread about anything CONFIRMED in a long time. Just a ton of back-and-forth rumors and rumored specs.

this is what this sites about though specualtion and fan talk

this is what this site is about though speculation and fan talk

[Joshua]

At this day in age, I think it's guaranteed that the Wii U will be more powerful than the PS3 and 360.

[Robotic Sunshine Commander]

http://www.youtube.c...d&v=OcnsG11MRE8

This video should be posted everywhere so people will understand that stupid rumor is fake.

i always like rich of review tech's videos lol

[KgGamesXL]

I was so happy when i Watched this finally some explains this so people understand and stop trolling and doubting the Wii U's power. Thank Goodness!!

[Stewox]

I agree with what you're saying, but to be clear.

The CPU is confirmed to be an IBM.
The GPU is confirmed to be an AMD(ATI to old people like me).

People do often forget the R700 thing was an IGN sourced rumour.
It's not been confirmed.
In fact, AMD have said it's NOT based on ANY single generation of chip they've made. It's completely custom, building on the years of experience they have.

Yes but that's when this comes in if you missed it on neogaf ... a few days old and pretty convincing ...

http://www.neogaf.co...postcount=11334

Alright, the second thing I wanted to put up here before I head back into exile is about the GPU. It's just a bit of deduction/speculation on my part based on what we know.

Wii U's GPU

I've been thinking about the GPU a bit recently, and in particular what we can infer from the decision to use an R700 series (Radeon HD4xxx) chipset in the development kits. Firstly, we know that the Wii U's GPU is, to some extent, a custom chip. It may well be based around an existing chip, but at the very least it has 32Mb of eDRAM onboard, and quite possibly some other extra stuff we don't know about. We also know that it began development in 2009. We can expect that in 2009 and early 2010 Nintendo and AMD settled down on the basic specifications for the chip, ie the number of SPUs, TMUs and ROPs, the use of VLIW5, VLIW4 or GCN architectures, and the intended manufacturing node. Now, sometime in late 2010 or early 2011, when Nintendo were putting together the first dev kits to be sent out to third parties, the GPU quite obviously wasn't ready, so they had to go with one of AMD's off the shelf cards as a stand-in, and they chose one from the R700 line (I've heard the HD4830, but I don't know if we've got confirmation of this).

Why did they do this?

We can pretty safely say that whatever GPU ends up in the Wii U, it will be manufactured at a 40nm or smaller process. Why then go with an older 55nm card when there were plenty of 40nm HD5xxx and HD6xxx cards available which could provide pretty much identical performance with a lower power draw? What characteristic does the Wii U's GPU share with the HD4xxx series that it doesn't with any card in the HD5xxx or HD6xxx lines? There's only one aspect that I can think of:

The HD4xxx series were the only 640 SPU cards available at the time the dev-kits were being put together.

This is actually a fairly sensible reason for putting a R700 series card in the dev kit; Nintendo had settled on a core configuration with 640 SPUs (and perhaps 32 TMUs and 16 ROPs), so a HD4830 would naturally have been the best fit for a development kit. I don't think it would be a stretch to say that this is good evidence for the final GPU being a 640 SPU part.

Now comes the real speculation. Early this year, we started to get reports that developers were getting new development kits with a performance boost over previous kits. That's the sort of thing you'd expect to hear if Nintendo replaced the R700 stand-in card with an early production version of the actual Wii U GPU. This lines up exactly with AMD's new 28nm HD7xxx series coming off the production line, and in particular the HD7770 (Cape Verde), their first 640 SPU part since the HD4xxx series. The HD7770, clocked down to about 600MHz-700Mhz, would fit pretty much perfectly into Nintendo's requirements as far as performance, size and heat are concerned.

Nintendo approached AMD in 2009 looking for a reasonably powerful, but low-wattage GPU to put in their mid-2012 console. It's not unreasonable to speculate that AMD said "we've got a 640 SPU part on a 28nm process planned for late 2011, how about we customise something around that?". It explains why they went with a HD4xxx card in the dev kits, it explains why the dev kit power boost came when it did, and it fits very neatly to what we've heard about performance and power consumption.

And to the inevitable "Nintendo would never do 28nm" responses, keep in mind that Nintendo have always used the smallest available node in manufacturing their hardware, right back to the 350nm chips in the N64. Also this would have been decided back in 2009/2010, when it would have been reasonable to expect the 28nm node to be ready for a 2012 reasonably-priced console. In fact, the push back of the release date from the summer could well be due in part to a desire to wait until the yields on 28nm chips increase.

We also have to consider whether NEC (now Renesas), who manufactured the Gamecube and Wii GPUs, and we can expect are first in line to manufacture the Wii U GPU, are capable of manufacturing at 28nm. As it happens, NEC announced a deal back in 2009 (when Nintendo would have been making the decision) with none other than IBM, to manufacture 28nm chips at East Fishkill, New York, in the very same facility which the Wii U's CPU is being manufactured. How's that for a coincidence?

that would totally explain the next but older article which may not been seen by Thraktor before he made that post ... but it's from january this year. Semiaccurate might have got the key there i bolded in the quote below.

http://semiaccurate....s-making-chips/

The current production parts are 32nm HKMG SOI on 300mm wafers, so that leaves two possible candidates for the customer. Since this is a release with IBM Microelectronics, that customer isn’t likely AMD. In any case, the production is currently small[devkits], with volume ramping up to full capacity by the second half of the year[final dev kits after e3]

So this somehow might be telling that the wiiU gpu might be on 32nm process ... remember TSMC canceled the 32nm node, and 28nm node is totally full and reserved but if the decision was made it better be before. We might not know since this might be the nextbox GPU if nintendo secured the 28nm node and left microsoft out. This is just what clues ... since nintendo always used the smalles process for best cooling and power efficiency so ...




Lastly some more info from a comment on the semiaccurate article

During the phase when AMD had its fabs, AMD-IBM alliance was mainly for SOI technologies. AMD was not interested to explore bulk ever since Opteron days.
AMD self-fab Days
AMD and IBM had what I loosely call the “Fishkill-SOI” Alliance
IBM also had a Fishkill-bulk” alliance. This included Samsung, Toshiba, Renesas, ST Micro, Chartered Semi etc.
The Foundry Company Days
When Mubadala Group brought AMDs fabs they initially called it The Foundry Company (TFC). TFC automatically became a part of Fishkill-SOI alliance.
A general foundry company cannot provide a pure SOI only service as most of the prospective candidates base their designs on Bulk. So TFC became a part of Fishkill-Bulk alliance too.
Global Foundry(GF) Days
TFC then acquired Chartered Semiconductor also and together AMD Manufacturing + Chartered Semiconductor became GF cementing the position of both Fishkill alliances.
Currently among the various IBM alliance members there are only 2 companies that are doing both processes(Bulk and SOI) simultaneously.
Global Foundries
ST Micro (SOI from 32nm and below only)
So theoritically AMD can second source their SOI MPUs/APUs to ST Micro also.
Global Foundries – SOI from 65nm
ST Micro

But my experience ends here ... i need to research a bit on these to understand this quote before i can comment on it - my time today isn't a lot so ... later

Also here (read in quotes and another link)
http://forum.beyond3...1&postcount=857

Others are speculating for alternative GPU setup if the "traditional" 640 SPU would end up being false.

So it's not in disagreement or conflict it's just as an alternative speculation ... to clear out any confusions.

EDITADD:

I made a random google search about "wiiu gpu 32nm" and this comes up.
http://www.fudzilla.com/games/item/23012-wii-u-hardware-not-a-surprise

I know fudzilla sometimes make pretty stupid statements and wrong ... but where did they got the info for 32nm might be somewhere else so ... i will continue searching.
Also now that i see that the CPU might be 32nm also this totally fits why there is a fishkill SOI alliance ... probably to group the chips by nm for the same vendor (nintendo) and other benefits as the transport and stuff since GPU and CPU obviously need to work connected and that might be some who knows (me speculating) easier testing and whatever if they're in the same fab close rather than miles apart or what ... no idea here but i hope it's helpful info.

I still need to research more because these are bits now - i need to have full picture in my mind to make my own speculation so i can't comment further now ...

Edited by Stewox, 06 April 2012 - 05:23 AM.