[Megadrive1988]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

DDR3 will be very cheap. You won't want to add a second type of RAM as it won't be cheaper but will add cost to the system. I'm pretty certain this is 2GBs unified RAM on a single bus, not too fast, with the eDRAM making up the graphics bandwidth.

That's pretty much what I'm counting on now.

[ninzel]

So this 1gb OS thing, if for example one person was playing a game on the tv and still also using OS non gaming functions at the same time and a second person was was using the tablet to use the OS, how much ram would that require from the OS?

[Megadrive1988]

Originally Posted by Rangers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R700

Even I would not guess at an 80 shader part. At least 320.

I would hope so.

A RV730-derived GPU should provide a decent boost from Xenos.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by ninzel

So this 1gb OS thing, if for example one person was playing a game on the tv and still also using OS non gaming functions at the same time and a second person was was using the tablet to use the OS, how much ram would that require from the OS?

That depends on what they are doing.

[MDX]

IBM has moved to 32 nm with their new Power7+:

The 32 nm SOI processor will have a die size of 567 mm2 and carry 2.1 billion transistors.

Im wondering, has there been confirmation recently that the WiiU CPU is still at 45nm? Would it have been too late, or even worth it to have moved to 32 nm since their 45nm announcement? Here is something:

Of course with a larger cache there will be fewer cache misses and consequently potentially lower benefit of SMT because multithreading takes advantage of stall time in the CPU when it has a cache miss.

As I recall some rumors that the WiiU CPU doesn't do much multi-threading, is that because the CPU is fed with a large enough cache?

[RudeCurve]

Why do Nintendo fans continue to hold out for some fantasy CPU that is based on the latest Power architecture and greatest lithography technology IBM has to offer?

[MDX]

Originally Posted by RudeCurve

Why do Nintendo fans continue to hold out for some fantasy CPU that is based on the latest Power architecture and greatest lithography technology IBM has to offer?

That is your answer to my question? Or are you ranting about something else??
Turns out, on Nintendo's website, they no longer promote the 45nm, they simply state:

CPU
IBM Power®-based multi-core processor


They also go out of the way to mention the following:

Energy Efficiency:
Wii U utilizes specially designed power-saving features to lower its energy consumption.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by RudeCurve

Why do Nintendo fans continue to hold out for some fantasy CPU that is based on the latest Power architecture and greatest lithography technology IBM has to offer?

I'm not a nintendo fan, but IBM has outright stated that it's Power7 based

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

I'm not a nintendo fan, but IBM has outright stated that it's Power7 based

What does 'based' mean? They've also stated outright that it's the same POWER7 chip used in Watson, which it isn't. POWER7 is a 200W chip as far as I can find. How do you get that down to something that'll fit in a 45 W console where the majority of the power budget is spent on the GPU?

With lots of conflicting information, people need to find the resolution of best fit. Which is that it isn't POWER7 but some low-powered PPC, Xenon/Broadway concept. Xenon without the massive vector units but with OoOE.

[Medu]

Originally Posted by MDX

Im wondering, has there been confirmation recently that the WiiU CPU is still at 45nm? Would it have been too late, or even worth it to have moved to 32 nm since their 45nm announcement? Here is something:

There would of been plenty of time and hopefully the 3rd party feedback pushed them in that direction but Nintendo make a lot of odd choices when it comes to hardware. Using a 4 year old process node when 32nm is widely available is just insane if the CPU ends up been a major bottleneck.

[ninzel]

So this thing is coming with a sensor bar. My impression was that they had ditched IR aiming,so could the sensor be just for Wiimote backward compatibility?

[Grall]

It's for the wiimote only; the pad has never had IR aiming capability.

[ninzel]

Ok.
Next thing I'm wondering is if Nintendo will allow the flash drive to be used by developers for things like caching and if so would this give any noticeable improvement to stuff like level loading or texture pop in?

[AlStrong]

Originally Posted by Megadrive1988

I would hope so.

A RV730-derived GPU should provide a decent boost from Xenos.

It would be more likely to be based off of the 40nm devices they already had available in 2009 - that doesn't mean it'll be a full fledged rv740, but there's more to a design than the raw specs/# of units.

Also, if the 32MB eDRAM is on the same die, it's even more likely to be 40nm - 28nm supply and even the availability of 28nm eDRAM at TSMC this year is questionable.

[Cyan]

Originally Posted by ninzel

Ok.
Next thing I'm wondering is if Nintendo will allow the flash drive to be used by developers for things like caching and if so would this give any noticeable improvement to stuff like level loading or texture pop in?

I hope so, but why not using a bit of that extra 1GB of RAM for streaming now that you mention it? Needless to say, developers could also just throw in the virtual memory stuff, like some developers do in certain games.

I think Nintendo have been smart not adding an HDD once and for all. A huge percentage of the HDDs for consoles are total shit, and I mean total shit.

What's the benefit for a console to have one? Not much for gaming.

They are only good for installation purposes and Nintendo giving us the choice to plug our own HDD model to the WiiU is certainly the way to go in the future.

I just hope Sony and MS follow a similar approach, HDD less consoles and allowing us to plug or custom HDDs, so the consoles are not as costly to manufacture and can focus the resources on other way more interesting parts of the system.

[ninzel]

Originally Posted by Cyan

I hope so, but why not using a bit of that extra 1GB of RAM for streaming now that you mention it? Needless to say, developers could also just throw in the virtual memory stuff, like some developers do in certain games.

I think Nintendo have been smart not adding an HDD once and for all. A huge percentage of the HDDs for consoles are total shit, and I mean total shit.

What's the benefit for a console to have one? Not much for gaming.

They are only good for installation purposes and Nintendo giving us the choice to plug our own HDD model to the WiiU is certainly the way to go in the future.

I just hope Sony and MS follow a similar approach, HDD less consoles and allowing us to plug or custom HDDs, so the consoles are not as costly to manufacture and can focus the resources on other way more interesting parts of the system.

I was thinking more along the lines of whether there would be an advantage to using a flash vs a regular HDD in terms of speed.

[Sonic]

Originally Posted by ninzel

I was thinking more along the lines of whether there would be an advantage to using a flash vs a regular HDD in terms of speed.

Yes. Speed is one of those advantages.

[Grall]

Flash needs too many dies and a complex controller in order to become truly speedy; too costly for a low-end device like the Wuu. Also, flashdrives' biggest advantage; small block size random accesses don't ever really happen in consoles. Since you don't have multiple programs running doing random I/O the I/O queue depth - if you can even talk in those terms for a console OS - never goes beyond 1...

A SSD would be largely a waste, cost-wise.

[LXFBN]

What do you guys think of posts like this on GAF?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=3192

[willardjuice]

Originally Posted by LXFBN

What do you guys think of posts like this on GAF?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=3192

What do you think of posts that link to pointless GAF posts?

[Sonic]

Originally Posted by LXFBN

What do you guys think of posts like this on GAF?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=3192

Please go ask other forum members of GAF what they think of the post on their board. Other than that, there's not a single game on Wii U that's been shown so far that looks next gen.

[Grall]

Originally Posted by Sonic

there's not a single game on Wii U that's been shown so far that looks next gen.

Are you surprised? Considering Wuu is a current-gen system...

[Sonic]

Of course not.

[(((interference)))]

So the RAM is confirmed to be 2 GB? That's more than I was expecting.

If they're reserving 1 GB for the OS, perhaps that's them being overly cautious and they'll release memory back to devs once the machine has been out for a while and they figure out a roadmap for the OS and decide what features to include or not.

[XpiderMX]

Originally Posted by (((interference)))

So the RAM is confirmed to be 2 GB? That's more than I was expecting.

2gb, but games can only use 1gb.