[Blazkowicz]

Originally Posted by MrFox

If Nintendo wants it to be "always on" with background downloading during the night, push notifications and what not, a split pool with low power RAM for the OS might be useful, so everything can be powered down and the CPU heavily throttled. (the Wii was already criticized for consuming way too much power on standby, maybe they paid attention to it)

Interesting.
My little idea : there aren't really two pools nor different memory, but say there are two 64bit or 32bit ddr3 controllers.
All data is interleaved on all chips (because it's how you get high bandwith). but when going stand by, all game data is discarded ("hibernated" on flash if you need it) ; all OS data that resided on memory chips 2 and 3 get copied to chips 0 and 1.
You can now deactivate one of the controllers and half the memory chips. Then stand-by function can be serviced by one underclocked PowerPC core. Memory can be slowed down and undervolted as well.

This could explain the plain 1GB + 1GB split, say the memory is cut in 4KB pages or byte blocks, "O" stands for OS and "G" stands for game data :

chip 0 | chip 1 | chip 2 | chip 3
-------+--------+--------+-------
  O1   |   G1   |   O2   |   G2   
  G3   |   O3   |   G4   |   O4

etc. (if that scheme makes sense)

copy stuff around and spin down, so to speak :

chip 0 | chip 1 
-------+-------
  O1   |   O2   
  O4   |   O3

(switch O3 and O4 during the copy if you feel it doesn't look good)

[Urian]

Originally Posted by MDX

What was stated that made you change your mind that the memory modules were of a different size?

Perspective.

[Shifty Geezer]

Interesting idea, although the 50/50 RAM split wouldn't favour this system. eg. In the case of 75% used for game and 25% for OS, the same game content could be copied out and the OS stuff migrated to two chips. As long as the OS can fit into two chips, your plan could be supported, placing an upper limit of 1GB on the OS, but no upper limit on game size.

[MDX]

Originally Posted by Urian

Perspective.

Yeah, thats what I thought.

The chips on the top are more square and larger in width than the ones on the side.
Perspective should have made them more rectangular and shorter because of the tilt and distance. But they are not.

However, looking at it again, I forgot that the chips on top are also not flat on the board, and what I can be calculating in could be their height... the compression of the photo doesn't help. Well maybe its safer to assume all four are the same size after all.

Anyway, now you are assuming the four chips each are 512MB of DDR3?
So you think there is no substantial amount of RAM on the MCM itself?

[Grall]

Nothing really revolutionary or anything revealed here, but better than nothing:

Wuublet video screen latency 1/60th of a second, says Rayman developer.

[wsippel]

Originally Posted by MrFox

If Nintendo wants it to be "always on" with background downloading during the night, push notifications and what not, a split pool with low power RAM for the OS might be useful, so everything can be powered down and the CPU heavily throttled. (the Wii was already criticized for consuming way too much power on standby, maybe they paid attention to it)

The eDRAM would be enough for that and much more energy efficient I guess.

[Dr Evil]

Originally Posted by MDX

The chips on the top are more square and larger in width than the ones on the side.

It only looks like that in this small picture:




When you zoom in the illusion disappears!! You can still zoom more in the link by pressing the magnifying glass
http://www.aijaa.com/DQ40J5

I tried to crop the chips with paint. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.
http://aijaa.com/Lj2Tf3

The chips are identical.

[TheLump]

Originally Posted by Dr Evil

It only looks like that in this small picture:




When you zoom in the illusion disappears!! You can still zoom more in the link by pressing the magnifying glass
http://www.aijaa.com/DQ40J5

I tried to crop the chips with paint. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.
http://aijaa.com/Lj2Tf3

The chips are identical.

Yeah part of the problem was that someone on GAF used photoshop to try and fix the perspective - but it ended up scewing the shape of the RAM chips. Alot of people saw that picture and thought it was the original (myself included) and in that altered pic they are obviously different shapes. In the original pic however, as shown above, they are clearly the same chips.

[HMBR]

I wonder how much money will AMD make by selling/licensing this GPU design for nintendo?

I'm asking that because of the strong news about the bad financial state of AMD, and consoles could play a important role for them...

[Rodéric]

Originally Posted by HMBR

I wonder how much money will AMD make by selling/licensing this GPU design for nintendo?

I'm asking that because of the strong news about the bad financial state of AMD, and consoles could play a important role for them...

ATi has always been fine, AMD on the other hand, has had ups and downs, and more downs than ups these years.

[MDX]

Im still curious to Renesas's role with the WiiU MCM.
Ive been stating that they might be supplying the RAM, based on an article I read.
But what if they are supplying the DSP?

Maybe something like this:

SH-4A CPU core with a maximum operating frequency of 400MHz, and realizes a processing performance of 720 MIPS

.

SH-4 - used whenever high performance is required such as car multimedia terminals, video game consoles, or set-top boxes

[bomlat]

The SH-4 was the CPU of the dreamcast.

[wsippel]

Originally Posted by MDX

Im still curious to Renesas's role with the WiiU MCM.
Ive been stating that they might be supplying the RAM, based on an article I read.
But what if they are supplying the DSP?

Renesas still has fabs and they know a thing or two about eDRAM - my guess is they manufacture the GPU.

[MDX]

Originally Posted by bomlat

The SH-4 was the CPU of the dreamcast.

True, but the SH-4 is not the same as the SH-4A as far as I can see.

[Rootax]

A lot of tweaks but I don't know if it's major things or not :

http://documentation.renesas.com/doc...b0003_sh4a.pdf

1.2 Changes from SH-4 to SH-4A

[Aidnas]

So what of those AMD emails regarding the GPU being an e6760?
There were three of them. One from a spaniard forum, one from gaf, and one from gbatemp.
Either they were all fake and the second two just copied the original, or AMD tech support was saying things it wasn't supposed to.

Either way, does Iwata's teardown of the console shed any light on things

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by Aidnas

So what of those AMD emails regarding the GPU being an e6760?
There were three of them. One from a spaniard forum, one from gaf, and one from gbatemp.
Either they were all fake and the second two just copied the original, or AMD tech support was saying things it wasn't supposed to.

Either way, does Iwata's teardown of the console shed any light on things

Simply put, fakes.

[Aidnas]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

Simply put, fakes.

How about complicatedly put?

[AlphaWolf]

Complicated.

There's zero chance of some tech support guy being read into a hardware contract with a third party for a couple of reasons. First the specs of these things are meant to be secret so they just don't tell everyone, secondly AMD doesn't provide tech support for consoles even if they contain their hardware.

So if the email is real (really from AMD and not a fabrication) It was just some guy who doesn't have a clue replying anyway.

[TheLump]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

Simply put, fakes.

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

Complicated.

There's zero chance of some tech support guy being read into a hardware contract with a third party for a couple of reasons. First the specs of these things are meant to be secret so they just don't tell everyone, secondly AMD doesn't provide tech support for consoles even if they contain their hardware.

So if the email is real (really from AMD and not a fabrication) It was just some guy who doesn't have a clue replying anyway.

They weren't fake, I tried it myself and got a similar response (also posted it on gaf)

But you're right, theres no reason at all to believe a customer services rep from AMD would have any information on the innards of the WiiU. I'm not sure why they said what they said, but I'm sure it wasn't based on any facts.


However, I also beleive that that will be the GPU which is most similar to GPU7 (wii u GPU) in terms of power/watt ratio and features when all is said and done. Just imho.

[TheLump]

So, interesting tidbit from wsippel over on GAF (not sure if its already known or not): WiiU has a multicore ARM aswell as the main PPC processor.

That pretty much (potentially) frees up the main CPU from OS related tasks, no?


Edit: Sorry, not really GPU related at all...

[Entropy]

Since the thread has stalled a bit, I'd like to reintroduce eDRAM as a topic.

Originally Posted by Gubbi

DRAM and logic processes are optimized differently. For DRAM you want very low static power, for logic you want very high dynamic performance. DRAM processes typically has less than 1% leakage power compared to a typical logic processes.

Integrating the DRAM, you end up compromising both DRAM and logic performance. You also get a more costly process. Steps are needed to create the trench capacitor for the DRAM cells, and all the metal layer steps needed for the logic area are wasted on the DRAM cell.

The compromised performance has extra consequences in a console where you cannot bin and sell slower units at a discount. In order to maximize yield you'll need to provision for higher power consumption of your lower quality bins. This impact the cost of the entire system (cooling, reliability, PSU). I'm guessing that's why MS hasn't opted for integrating the eDRAM of Xenos; They don't need the performance so it is cheaper overall to have a separate die and spend a few dozen cents on adding a substrate to connect the CPU/GPU to the eDRAM die.

To which AlStrong added

Originally Posted by AlStrong

Indeed. A not-so-insignificant factor when it comes to fab times or yield...

And to those two I'd add software issues.
Ports of software developed on other platforms is likely to under utilize the eDRAM (or even not use it at all!), since it encourages a way of doing things (lots of read-modify-write passes) that is a bad model when bandwidth is more limited. To some extent the same goes for upcoming multi platform titles - lowest denominator coding will penalize the eDRAM approach of Nintendo.

You don't do a custom design with it's associated issues to reach parity with a more traditional way of doing thing at a given cost in R&D, gates and power. It has to be decidedly better than the more straightforward approach to justify itself.

So what I'm missing is an in depth discussion about how the speculated amount of eDRAM would affect what techniques you could use, what the the gains would be, then how targeting multiple platforms might compromise what you can do, and so on and so forth. I can't believe Nintendo would have chosen that path if they didn't feel certain the gains would be substantial. Otherwise they could have saved themselves the risk by spending their budget elsewhere, or simply saved time, money, power and gates and dropped eDRAM entirely from the GPU. Shifty made a valiant effort to get a good thread going on eDRAM back in January, but it got bogged down in the shortcomings of the XBOX360 implementation. A fresh take would be appreciated.

[MystWalker]

Since not much activity has been happening in this thread, I'll take the opportunity to point out some statements I noticed in the DF analyses of the Wii U, and, hopefully, encourage some discussion.

In this article, Richard made some interesting statements. Like:

On the plus side, Wii U benefits from a significantly more modern graphics core, equated by many with an entry-level enthusiast GPU a couple of generations old, provided by AMD. Our sources tell us that the hardware is rich in features compared to the Xenos core within the Xbox 360 (also supplied by AMD) but somewhat lacking in sheer horsepower: still a useful upgrade overall though.

I suppose the question now, though, is lacking in sheer horsepower compared to what? Xenos or some kind of expectation for a next-gen 2012 console?

[. . .]the tri-core IBM "Espresso" CPU is an acknowledged weakness compared to the current-gen consoles - the processors consisting of revised, upgraded versions of the Wii's Broadway architecture, in itself an overclocked version of the main core at the heart of the ancient GameCube. Nintendo clearly hoped that tripling up on cores, upping clock speed and adding useful features such as out of order execution would do the trick[. . .]

I don't exactly now whether this came from a source(s) or whether it is just from the other rumors that were flouting around, but maybe Espresso is a derivative of the PowerPC 7xx architecture.

[. . .]We also know that the silicon is manufactured in the 40-45nm range[. . .]

Again, I don't know whether this is from a source or not, but could potentially be a nice tidbit.


Moving on to this older article, I don't think anybody commented on this statement.

One developer working on a Wii U launch game told us he was able to optimise his game's CPU main core usage by up to 15 per cent throughout the course of development, and further optimisations are expected before the game comes out.

We've heard about the asymmetrical L2 Cache, and someone, I believe it was Iherre on GAF in one of its countless & infamous Wii U Speculation Threads , hinted a couple times to an asymmetrical design with one "master core" and two "slave cores" I believe is how he put it. Perhaps a Gaf member would be willing to track down exactly what he said in his posts. The above post seems to support that, referring to a "main CPU core." It's all just speculation, but how might such a system be set up? Would the game run on the main core with devs. distributing certain instructions to the other cores without them explicitly running their own threads? Maybe it solves some issues with latency that multithreaded games tend to have?

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by MystWalker

In this article, Richard made some interesting statements. Like: I suppose the question now, though, is lacking in sheer horsepower compared to what? Xenos or some kind of expectation for a next-gen 2012 console?

I expect lacking compared to a GPU expected for the price range and a 2012 console, in the same way Wii was lacking horsepower irrespective of what PS360 had to offer.

The above post seems to support that, referring to a "main CPU core."

It's ambiguous. You could parse it with the 'usage' attached - "main CPU core usage" - and interpret it as the main CPU core (symmetric MP) as opposed to the ancillary cores (DSP, possible ARM/s), or even a bad explanation that the game's main code on the CPU has been optimised but the extra code is still struggling.

The only reason I can see for an asymmetric core would be cheapening out. Provide one full-fat, full-taste proper CPU core, and provide a couple of lite, sugar-free variations on the side to support parallel processing of simpler jobs. Given the die is so flippin' tiny, this would be a bit of a slap in the face to devs IMO. There'd be no need to make such a limited system given that three full-fledged cores with all the trimmings could be included in a very small, low power part.

Apart from an asymmetric cache, I don't believe the CPU design is asymmetric.

[Grall]

512k L2 isn't terrible, if that's what the "sugar-free" cores are equipped with; current intel desktop CPUs only have 256k, and the need for the L3 they're paired with is generally due to the bloated nature of today's desktop and server software.

This probably is the least point of concern about the wuu's hardware, IMO, along with things like the number of USB ports etc (which is surprisingly generous akshully.)