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Rumor: Wii U final specs

I wonder why xbox emulation never materialized. it had a Geforce 3 Ti200 and a celeron and was based on a direct x api. This is all pretty standard stuff yet one of the most convoluted hardware designs (PS2) is emulated to a surprising degree of compatibility.

Disregarding that it is not exactly a GeForce 3 Ti 200 but a custom chip somewhere between GF3 and GF4 (and that it's not exactly a Celeron either), similar hardware doesn't necessarily mean simple emulation. Here's an explanation why: http://www.ngemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=132032
 
maybe someone can answer this: How much effort is it to get an existing game running on Wii-U? From what i heard, not that much effort. So how much effort, REALISTICLY, is it to try and see if things can be slightly improved then (framerate, or/and resolution, or/and texture detail, or/and Anti aliassing)?
 
Disregarding that it is not exactly a GeForce 3 Ti 200 but a custom chip somewhere between GF3 and GF4 (and that it's not exactly a Celeron either), similar hardware doesn't necessarily mean simple emulation. Here's an explanation why: http://www.ngemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=132032
True as that might be (it's a little over dramatic; on the account of them taking the piss at emulating a Geforce 3, let's just point out how custom and undocumented both PS2 and Gamecube are), it's also an issue of interest.

Such project doesn't have the interest of a Dolphin/PCSX2 dev communities and thus it lacks it's resources.


Let's face it, why do we want an Xbox 1 emulator? Panzer Dragoon Orta and what else? Pretty much everything else has been ported elsewhere.
maybe someone can answer this: How much effort is it to get an existing game running on Wii-U? From what i heard, not that much effort. So how much effort, REALISTICLY, is it to try and see if things can be slightly improved then (framerate, or/and resolution, or/and texture detail, or/and Anti aliassing)?
Should be mostly easy, but CPU has been said to be a challenge, probably not because it's weak compared to current gen but because it can't be taken advantage of in the same way.

Still, things are never that linear; if something is unoptimized (and if you're quick-porting it's bound to be) then adding stuff like that is difficult before going through the code, cleaning and tweaking it; it boils down to all systems being different and doing things more effectively one way rather than the other, hence developers are still getting used to this platform and gaining performance/learning how to get it out. the effort is not possible to measure realistically; in theory improving it a little it's not hard at all since it has the overhead to do so, but in practical terms real gains require optimization.

Business as usual.
 

ozfunghi

Member
maybe someone can answer this: How much effort is it to get an existing game running on Wii-U? From what i heard, not that much effort. So how much effort, REALISTICLY, is it to try and see if things can be slightly improved then (framerate, or/and resolution, or/and texture detail, or/and Anti aliassing)?

3 weeks or so ago, Ideaman came in and claimed that his sources saw "great great" improvements in framerates since februari (think?) and WITH added effects and AA. Myself amongst others have been asking him what exactly he meant with "great great". Finally yesterday, he quickly responded "2x". I did ask him something else through PM but i don't know if he's ok with me sharing. Anyway, doubling or nearly doubling the framerate is quite a jump. Keeping in mind, and Ideaman jump in if i'm mistaken, that these games were not built ground up for WiiU.
 

Kenka

Member
Jump from 720p/30 Hz ---> 1080p/60 Hz requires 4.5 times more bandwidth of the memory.

2 times can either mean higher resolution or twice the framerate. I would love both though.
 

ozfunghi

Member
Jump from 720p/30 Hz ---> 1080p/60 Hz requires 4.5 times more bandwidth of the memory.

2 times can either mean higher resolution or twice the framerate. I would love both though.

Is this a response to me? Ideaman said "2x" and was talking about framerate, not power, not resolution, not AI or physics. Framerate, with added effects and AA compared to the same game 6 months ago.
 

big_erk

Member
Wii+U+CPU.jpg


Hopefully not true. It would be pretty WTF worthy.

Has anyone else chimed in to corroborate this? It keeps popping up, and a lot of people are taking it a face value, but nothing I've seen from the actual players points to this being true. IBM has said it's an all new custom chip. 3 Broadways would hardly be considered all new, no matter what the clock.

Whatever the truth is, I'm all in anyway.
 

ozfunghi

Member
:(

(good news though)

Don't know why the sad face. In order to double the framerate (as well as add effects/AA) you are actually pushing the hardware to do double of what it was doing before. Framerate isn't some trivial performance benchmark.

Has anyone else chimed in to corroborate this? It keeps popping up, and a lot of people are taking it a face value, but nothing I've seen from the actual players points to this being true. IBM has said it's an all new custom chip. 3 Broadways would hardly be considered all new, no matter what the clock.

Whatever the truth is, I'm all in anyway.

Well, considering how eager Arkam was to bitchslap the WiiU CPU in one of the WUST threads, on top of him being the actual leak of this topic, i haven't excluded the possibility that this Espresso guy, is in fact also Arkam. If you browse his posting history on Neogaf, you will see he makes simmilar claims along the lines of "that's exactly what they did, they took broadway and made it 3-core"... but again, paraphrasing. Here you go: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=41437121&postcount=186 Keeping in mind this guy has basically admitted as much as having only 2nd hand information (is no techie, had no handson with the hardware), he sure likes to get his point across. Even after admitting they were basically trying to run 360 code on a WiiU.
 
Has anyone else chimed in to corroborate this? It keeps popping up, and a lot of people are taking it a face value, but nothing I've seen from the actual players points to this being true. IBM has said it's an all new custom chip. 3 Broadways would hardly be considered all new, no matter what the clock.

Whatever the truth is, I'm all in anyway.

People with an agenda of bashing the Wii U like to parade this around as 3 Broadways, not only that, they also like to imply it's a bad thing. Broadways were Power based and OoOe too.
 

Kenka

Member
Don't know why the sad face. In order to double the framerate (as well as add effects/AA) you are actually pushing the hardware to do double of what it was doing before. Framerate isn't some trivial performance benchmark.
In a nutshell, they achieved more frames and used the 32 MB of RAM on the CPU too on top of that. If that's really what happenned, then bye bye jaggies, you won't be missed.

I hope it's for a game I care about.
 

Quaz51

Member
CPU technology isn't just cores
today CPU technology is internal bus tech (ring bus...), multi-core tech, complex memory cache tech, multiple I/O tech and controller (RAM, network...), hardware accelerator tech (crypto, compression...), thermal sensors tech, dynamic power scaling...
and process technology (45nm, SOI, eDRAM...)

Maybe IBM pick up in the Power7 ecosystem (Power7 is probably the last moderne IBM CPU) for all (or part) of this modern techs but with PPC476 cores instead of Power7 core. Power7 core is too big for a WiiU CPU and inadequate. "broadway echanced" or PPC476 cores is more coherent and logic
i think everyone are right but don't talk the same thing

for example Cell technology isn't the core CPU technology (PPE like X360) but EIB ring bus technolgy, Flexio I/O technology and XIO RAM controller, SPU technology ect...
 
Has anyone else chimed in to corroborate this? It keeps popping up, and a lot of people are taking it a face value, but nothing I've seen from the actual players points to this being true. IBM has said it's an all new custom chip. 3 Broadways would hardly be considered all new, no matter what the clock.

Whatever the truth is, I'm all in anyway.

Well the codename for the CPU has always been Espresso. After learning that and the "enhanced Broadway" description to me it sounded like he was taking it too literally. With Matt saying there are 5 processes per core, which to me sounds like instructions per clock, that's a 2.5x increase over Broadway's supposedly 2. So that alone tells us they aren't "just reusing" the Wii CPU.
 

Donnie

Member
Well the codename for the CPU has always been Espresso. After learning that and the "enhanced Broadway" description to me it sounded like he was taking it too literally. With Matt saying there are 5 processes per core, which to me sounds like instructions per clock, that's a 2.5x increase over Broadway's supposedly 2. So that alone tells us they aren't "just reusing" the Wii CPU.

What's Matt's background in the industry?
 
What's Matt's background in the industry?

Who is Matt? A poster on this board?

The other thing that has confused me over the past few months is that some sources claim 4 instructions per clock on the PPC 476fp while others claim 5. Which is accurate? Does the former leave out the FPU perhaps?

Also, I remember wsippel claiming that an EIB might be used for the CPU. Where does this info hail from and what would be the benefit?
 

Donnie

Member
Who is Matt? A poster on this board?

The other thing that has confused me over the past few months is that some sources claim 4 instructions per clock on the PPC 476fp while others claim 5. Which is accurate? Does the former leave out the FPU perhaps?

Also, I remember wsippel claiming that an EIB might be used for the CPU. Where does this info hail from and what would be the benefit?

Could be that some are thinking of 476fp and others 470s. AFAIK the later doesn't have the full FPU of the 476fp (though it could be coupled with a VMX unit).
 

Earendil

Member
Who is Matt? A poster on this board?

The other thing that has confused me over the past few months is that some sources claim 4 instructions per clock on the PPC 476fp while others claim 5. Which is accurate? Does the former leave out the FPU perhaps?

Also, I remember wsippel claiming that an EIB might be used for the CPU. Where does this info hail from and what would be the benefit?

I was confused about what EIB was, so I looked it up. Reminds me of token ring, except you know... useful.
 
Fourth Storm, meet Matt. Matt, Fourth Storm.

Thanks for the link. Hey Matt! I do recognize your avatar from some point. Hope you're enjoying the Wii U Speculation Community as much as myself.

Could be that some are thinking of 476fp and others 470s. The later doesn't have the standard FPU of the 476fp but instead uses a VMX unit (AFAIK).

The most I was able to uncover was that they at one point had plans to add VMX into a future edition. If they ever actually did, I never found out. That being said, I doubt Espresso has VMX or we wouldn't be hearing about the issues. Also, it would have been a noteworthy bulletpoint for one of the "spec leaks," which I have an inkling Nintendo ok'ed to shut some of us naggers up. Haha, who the hell knows?
 
That's how he gets his info about Nintendo lol

Haha. I wanna say he was clarifying something at that time.

Who is Matt? A poster on this board?

The other thing that has confused me over the past few months is that some sources claim 4 instructions per clock on the PPC 476fp while others claim 5. Which is accurate? Does the former leave out the FPU perhaps?

Also, I remember wsippel claiming that an EIB might be used for the CPU. Where does this info hail from and what would be the benefit?

That's a good question because as I looked further into it just now I saw the same, "conflicting" info. The info in one of IBM's papers says 4 (3 interger, 1 FP). POWER7 can issue six or eighe per cycle. I don't know which is the proper one to use though one article only referred to the core being able to do six.
 

Thraktor

Member
When systems are emulated does that mean they are literally recontructed in a 3D space? Is every circuit, transistor, chip, wire, and mechanical part recreated with thier physical properties as close as possible to the real life hardware? Is that how they do it?

As Theonik points out, this isn't really feasible for emulating a games console, but it is actually done in emulating old synthesisers. The lowest-level form of emulation that would actually be used in emulating games consoles would be instruction-level emulation, where the processor is emulated on an instruction by instruction basis. This takes the machine code of the game, which would be something along the lines of this:

Load data at memory address #00abc123 into register 1
Add register 1 to register 2
Increment address register 4
Store register 2 to memory at address register 4
etc., etc.

and actually goes through every instruction, calculating the results and keeping track of the registers and program counters and memory and soforth. This should give you pretty much perfect emulation, but it requires a substantially faster processor than the one that's being emulated, and gets particularly tricky once you start to think about emulating GPUs. Nonetheless, it's suitable for old consoles, and my guess would be that this is the way NES and SNES games are emulated on the virtual console.

Emulating more modern consoles requires higher-level emulation, which I believe usually involves emulating the API. This would mean identifying higher-level commands, such as

Draw a triangle with co-ordinates A, B and C on screen with texture D

and directly carrying out those commands, rather than the lower-level instructions they break down into. This can be a lot faster than instruction-level emulation, and has the added advantage of being able to change the way the game is rendered (at a higher resolution, for example). It (to the best of my knowledge) is what Dolphin and the Virtual Console N64 emulator rely on, for GPU emulation at least. It does bring compatibility issues with it, though. For one thing, it's tricky to get pixel-perfect emulation right, as you'd have to have a very intimate knowledge of how the GPU carries out the API commands to get it just right. Secondly, and more importantly, it breaks down when developers bypass the API and write their own assembly or microcode, which is something that happened a lot on the N64. This is the main reason that the N64 has so few games on the Virtual Console; they can't handle the custom microcode with their high-level emulator, but the Wii isn't powerful enough to run instruction-level emulation of the RCP (the N64's GPU). Dolphin has similar issues with a few of the Gamecube's more technically complex titles. In both cases the Rogue Squadron games from Factor 5 are the trickiest to emulate, due to the sheer amount of low-level optimisation that Factor 5 managed to squeeze out of each console.

One thing I hope Nintendo manage with the Virtual Console on the Wii U is full instruction-level emulation of the N64. We'd have to give up the increased resolution we get with N64 games on the Wii, but we'd get a much bigger library, which I'm sure would be worth the trade.
 

jett

D-Member
When systems are emulated does that mean they are literally recontructed in a 3D space? Is every circuit, transistor, chip, wire, and mechanical part recreated with thier physical properties as close as possible to the real life hardware? Is that how they do it?

No haha, they haven't managed to do that even for the simplest and oldest of computer hardwares(if what you meant is emulating virtual transistors). It's just a moderate software approximation of the hardware, and mostly try to run the games as best and as playable possible, sometimes with game-specific hacks, disregarding how it would actually work on the real hardware, as long as the result is perceptibly the same or similar.
 
Maybe IBM pick up in the Power7 ecosystem (Power7 is probably the last moderne IBM CPU) for all (or part) of this modern techs but with PPC476 cores instead of Power7 core. Power7 core is too big for a WiiU CPU and inadequate. "broadway echanced" or PPC476 cores is more coherent and logic
i think everyone are right but don't talk the same thing
Yet, if they did that we wouldn't have 3 broadways at hand; it's a bad way to put things no matter how you look at it.

Intel also took the Pentium 1 design out to make the Atoms; and while they're crappy they're not Pentium 1's.


If you change the surrounding environment for a CPU everything about it changes; so the comparison ceases to be valid.

For instance, Pentium 4 Prescott actually had lower performance in games than the preceding Pentium 4 Northwood; this was because the extra L2 cache lengthned the stage pipeline further. Simply changing it so they could have twice the cache made them act differently (they introduced a further bottleneck)


We don't know how scalable Power7 is, but knowing a 3.8 GHz octocore wastes 200 watts TDP; if it was to be completely proportional (it never is) then 3 cores would amount to 75 watts; still sitting at 3.8 GHz (and there's no way wii u is pulling ahead of the 3.2 GHz mark; might sit as low as 2.4 GHz)

Add that to a design that is rumored to lack SMT (2-way or 4-way for that matter) and you're already saving tons of energy. (probably still not in the 25 watt laptop cpu range though)

Now, we don't know what the PR spin is, if there is one. They could update a PPC 476 to Power ISA v.2.06 (it's Power ISA v.2.05) and claim it has the ISA in common with Power7 therefore it's somewhat based/inherits stuff from it. But seems unpractical.

The best bet if it's something like that would be the PowerPC e600, which is a upgraded PPC 7xxx; it still wouldn't be a overclocked broadway, though. For one, this is a PPC G4, broadway/gecko was a PPC G3, and they had a smaller execution pipeline, meaning they actually beat the shit out of a G4 at the same clockrate (evidenced when later iBook G3 went into G4 MHz territory and beat the crap out of some similar clocked G4's).

The reterent is that these cpu's are 32 bit only, and don't know if anyone should go with that in 2012. Changing them to address that though would make them a totally different CPU.

Nevertheless, knowing how practical Nintendo is, I'd say the chance of the 3 broadway thing is crazy; they probably took something off the shelf and worked around that; anything else would be stupid, so no, it's not a freaking G3, no way.
 

AzaK

Member
3 weeks or so ago, Ideaman came in and claimed that his sources saw "great great" improvements in framerates since februari (think?) and WITH added effects and AA. Myself amongst others have been asking him what exactly he meant with "great great". Finally yesterday, he quickly responded "2x". I did ask him something else through PM but i don't know if he's ok with me sharing. Anyway, doubling or nearly doubling the framerate is quite a jump. Keeping in mind, and Ideaman jump in if i'm mistaken, that these games were not built ground up for WiiU.
Shit, where was this posted?

Either I can't remember or I never seen it mentioned. I do remember him commenting on something dealing with Nintendo and Google (I believe) at some point.

Who is this Matt dude? Oz posted I link I think to FourthStorm's query but it's not there. Am I just too tired?
 

StevieP

Banned
Either I can't remember or I never seen it mentioned. I do remember him commenting on something dealing with Nintendo and Google (I believe) at some point.

Matt works for google from what I recall, and there is a good reason why he has some... knowledge. His poster name on GAF is literally Matt.
 

Matt

Member
That's a good question because as I looked further into it just now I saw the same, "conflicting" info. The info in one of IBM's papers says 4 (3 interger, 1 FP). POWER7 can issue six or eighe per cycle. I don't know which is the proper one to use though one article only referred to the core being able to do six.

May be wrong on what I said.
 

Log4Girlz

Member
At least until people actually start making games that push the hardware... Then we'll probably have a lot of fancy on the screen at 30fps, lol

I suspect the vast majority of Wii U games will be 720 p and 30 FPS....but then again so will the majority of Durango/PS4 games :p
 

AzaK

Member
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=42272492&postcount=3795


This was his response when pressed further about it.
Thanks

Its a weird quote, saying 2 x but then saying you can guess what kind of frame rate improvement that is...isn't it 2 x?
Yea, just what I thought. Very ambiguous.

I suspect the vast majority of Wii U games will be 720 p and 30 FPS....but then again so will the majority of Durango/PS4 games :p

I'm OK with this if its taking the power of a machine capable of high quality current gen graphics at 60fps and using that power for 30fps.
 
I hope these improvements came about as a result of the dev kits more so than the devs own engines and tools!

I think it's a good sign though. The last few months I've got the feeling the U is cutting it VERY VERY fine making launch. So long as launch hardware is solid and lasts right the way through to the next console launch, it's all good; software can always be updated.

But considering the sprint to launch, games looking a bit better than on-par at the very start, to then receiving what sounds like a major boost a few months before launch... that's good vibes.
 

ozfunghi

Member
Its a weird quote, saying 2 x but then saying you can guess what kind of frame rate improvement that is...isn't it 2 x?

Ok, maybe some context/history should be provided. I've been spamming and bugging Ideaman ever since he made those first claims. He kept promising "soon" and "maybe in a couple of days". In the meanwhile i had been posing hypothetical cases such as "at what rate would a game running at about 30 fps 6 months ago, run now including extra effects and AA? Less than 40, 40 to 50 or 50 to 60 or more?"

So most likely that's where the "2X" comes from.

Seems to have gone or wrong link

It's all over that page. Thread is locked so you can't quote anymore.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=41506081&postcount=1105
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=41506487&postcount=1111
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=41507162&postcount=1119
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=41507562&postcount=1130
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=41508338&postcount=1144
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=41508639&postcount=1149


This was for games NOT built from the ground up for WiiU, so most likely Ideaman is talking about games we already know/knew exist(ed) or launch window even. Let's just say, if it were for a game such as Assassins Creed III or Mass Effect 3 or Darksiders 2... and they were already matching performance of PS360, that they would surpass that by launch. Let alone were the games built specifically for WiiU and not a port from PS360.
 

Rolf NB

Member
That's a good question because as I looked further into it just now I saw the same, "conflicting" info. The info in one of IBM's papers says 4 (3 interger, 1 FP). POWER7 can issue six or eighe per cycle. I don't know which is the proper one to use though one article only referred to the core being able to do six.
Switch "processes" into "execution units" and you got it.

Gekko/Broadway cores still fit the bill. 2 integer units, 1 fp unit, 1 load/store unit, 1 branch unit makes five. Dispatch rate is three per clock.

It's not unusual to have more execution units than you can start instructions on per clock, and due to pipelining it really isn't much of a limitation in practice.
 

TheNatural

My Member!
I don't understand why Nintendo just doesn't release specs. OK, it's not about graphics or anything, but releasing specs doesn't negate any message. It's just a description of what's in the damn machine.
 
I don't understand why Nintendo just doesn't release specs. OK, it's not about graphics or anything, but releasing specs doesn't negate any message. It's just a description of what's in the damn machine.

Because it serves no purpose other than to satisfy the curiosity of a minuscule group of people. Basically, there's more train spotters in the world - not sure what they says about spec snoops ;p
 
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