Kacho
Member
Wait, are you leaving GAF too?
-
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Rumor: Wii U final specs
- Thread starter EatChildren
- Start date
Wait, are you leaving GAF too?
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
At least do us the honour of coming back to give us your Nintendo Network handle at some point :^(
Where are you going?
BlockheadBrown
Member
You will be missed.
Good luck!
Yeah seems pretty extreme to give up cold turkey, I hope he's OK.
bgassassin
Member
Don't worry guys. Things are fine. And it's because they are fine that I'm able to do this. There are some projects I want to devote my time to and messageboards can be an unintentional distraction. So this was about shifting priorities. Also I've been winding down how much I post the past few weeks, so I don't think I would consider it going cold turkey. As for getting a Wii U, since building a new PC is a part of those priorities I'll hopefully get one early next year if they're available. So that's probably the soonest some of you might see me again.
I might still post some this coming week, but if I do it will be definitely be the last.
I might still post some this coming week, but if I do it will be definitely be the last.
Don't worry guys. Things are fine. And it's because they are fine that I'm able to do this. There are some projects I want to devote my time to and messageboards can be an unintentional distraction. So this was about shifting priorities. Also I've been winding down how much I post the past few weeks, so I don't think I would consider it going cold turkey. As for getting a Wii U, since building a new PC is a part of those priorities I'll hopefully get one early next year if they're available. So that's probably the soonest some of you might see me again.
I might still post some this coming week, but if I do it will be definitely be the last.
You've been a great contributor in this forum, man. Have a great break
Horse Armour
Member
What? No. I know it's super convenient that he's leaving shortly before the Wii U specs are revealed and that recent rumours have pegged him as likely making it up all along but I swear that this is just a coincidence and it is nothing like the time that GAF poster misled GAF about the Wii specs back in 2006 and saying that it was near an Xbox 360, the people saying that he is are just jealous haters. We LOVE you BG!The truth is that you have been BS all of us and want o leave before shit hits the fan.
Don't worry guys. Things are fine. And it's because they are fine that I'm able to do this. There are some projects I want to devote my time to and messageboards can be an unintentional distraction. So this was about shifting priorities. Also I've been winding down how much I post the past few weeks, so I don't think I would consider it going cold turkey. As for getting a Wii U, since building a new PC is a part of those priorities I'll hopefully get one early next year if they're available. So that's probably the soonest some of you might see me again.
I might still post some this coming week, but if I do it will be definitely be the last.
When you do get one let's exchange friend codes
lol
What the hell are you talking about?
snowdog1971
Banned
You might have to add some time onto that total, the iFixit fellahs had to sneak the 3DS into the hospital to give it an MRI to find out the FCRAM if I remember correctly lol.
The Wii U is actually only as powerful as a pocket calculator from 1985.
Fuck yes. This is a whole different Nintendo we're talking about, guys. Calculator power!
GrotesqueBeauty
Banned
I can see the tagline now- Wii U: U Do The Math
Mazer Rackham
Member
"Now you're playing with numbers"
Don't worry guys. Things are fine. And it's because they are fine that I'm able to do this. There are some projects I want to devote my time to and messageboards can be an unintentional distraction. So this was about shifting priorities. Also I've been winding down how much I post the past few weeks, so I don't think I would consider it going cold turkey. As for getting a Wii U, since building a new PC is a part of those priorities I'll hopefully get one early next year if they're available. So that's probably the soonest some of you might see me again.
I might still post some this coming week, but if I do it will be definitely be the last.
That sucks for us but good for you, man. Good luck with whatever ur projects are and thanks for all the great info and insights!
Freaky boobah gif one last time? No?
Bending_Unit_22
Member
Hell yeah, I had a calculator that solved differential equations. Power people, power.
But can Wii U plot Polar Graphics?
Apophis2036
Banned
All the best in whatever you do BG !, you kept me and many others entertained from WUST 2 all the way up until this thread.
/Salute.
/Salute.
@ BG - You were 1 of the reasons I joined NeoGaf. You answered a question for me on the ign boards and I figured that if most people here was as down to earth as you, then neogaf would be the only message board I needed.
I found out that a decent amount of people here are jerks but its alot of good people too so it balances it out lol.
I wish you the best and hope to see you again whenever you feel its your time to be apart of the message board life again.
I found out that a decent amount of people here are jerks but its alot of good people too so it balances it out lol.
I wish you the best and hope to see you again whenever you feel its your time to be apart of the message board life again.
Smurfman256
Member
Sad to see that you are going, bg.
Back on the subject of the Wii U specs, approximately how may GFLOPS per watt does the PowerPC 476fp get? I know that it's 1GHz per watt, so what would its GFLOPS/watt be?
Back on the subject of the Wii U specs, approximately how may GFLOPS per watt does the PowerPC 476fp get? I know that it's 1GHz per watt, so what would its GFLOPS/watt be?
gamergirly
Member
Don't worry guys. Things are fine. And it's because they are fine that I'm able to do this. There are some projects I want to devote my time to and messageboards can be an unintentional distraction. So this was about shifting priorities. Also I've been winding down how much I post the past few weeks, so I don't think I would consider it going cold turkey. As for getting a Wii U, since building a new PC is a part of those priorities I'll hopefully get one early next year if they're available. So that's probably the soonest some of you might see me again.
I might still post some this coming week, but if I do it will be definitely be the last.
Good luck with your adventures, bg! We expect you back fulltime next December for the next round of discussions
Trevelyan9999
Banned
Don't worry guys. Things are fine. And it's because they are fine that I'm able to do this. There are some projects I want to devote my time to and messageboards can be an unintentional distraction. So this was about shifting priorities. Also I've been winding down how much I post the past few weeks, so I don't think I would consider it going cold turkey. As for getting a Wii U, since building a new PC is a part of those priorities I'll hopefully get one early next year if they're available. So that's probably the soonest some of you might see me again.
I might still post some this coming week, but if I do it will be definitely be the last.
Not buying it. As much as you say you'll be taking a hiatus, something will happen that will draw you back here in a month tops. We'll keep the seat warm for you though
Glad you were able to share what you have. Thanks and good luck!
Fourth Storm
Member
Don't worry guys. Things are fine. And it's because they are fine that I'm able to do this. There are some projects I want to devote my time to and messageboards can be an unintentional distraction. So this was about shifting priorities. Also I've been winding down how much I post the past few weeks, so I don't think I would consider it going cold turkey. As for getting a Wii U, since building a new PC is a part of those priorities I'll hopefully get one early next year if they're available. So that's probably the soonest some of you might see me again.
I might still post some this coming week, but if I do it will be definitely be the last.
It's been real, man! I enjoyed our interactions and learned a bit in the process as well. Let's definitely swap friend codes (or however that will work - sheesh still many mysteries a month out) when you do get your hands on a U.
Be well!
I feel like these threads have become a little less exciting as the crazy speculation has died down with our greater knowledge of the Wii U's innards. To remedy this, I'm going to jump ahead and start some crazy speculation about Nintendo's next console after the Wii U. To make sure the speculation sounds as crazy as possible, I'm going to call their next-next-gen machine the Wii V.
A long time ago in one of the Wii U speculation threads I talked a bit about ray-tracing/path-tracing, and how we might see consoles appear around 2020 with path-tracing GPUs designed by Intel (specifically an evolution of their Larabee/MIC/Xeon Phi line of many-core processors). It's occurred to me, though, that it might not be Intel who are best placed to create such path-tracing chips, but IBM instead.
In a nutshell, what you need to create a good path-tracing chip is a crapload of cores (which can be fairly bare-bones), and a big coherent cache. Intel's Xeon Phi co-processor (which is an evolution of the Larabee design) goes part-way to achieving this. It's got 50 cores and a fairly large coherent cache, and Intel have actually shown off path-tracing demos on the architecture. It does have a few limitations, though. For one, the use of the old P5 x86 architecture (intended to benefit its applications as a HPC co-processor) isn't ideal for the path-tracing problem. Secondly, its use of a ring bus will become a significant limitation as more cores are added.
The reason I've started to think about IBM as a potential creator of such a chip is a report I posted a week or so back which mentioned IBM's new 3D stacking tech which allows them to stack chips on top of a big chunk of eDRAM. By taking the cache off the die, it allows them to squeeze a lot more cores on there, and do some other interesting things besides. To illustrate, let's consider the SoC that could be at the heart of the Wii V, which we'll say launches in November 2018.
The Wii V's SoC consists of four main components, all manufactured on a 10nm process. The first is the CPU, a fairly standard, eight core out-of-order design running at 3.6GHz, with a moderate, but not huge L2 cache. The second is the co-processor (or GPU, if you will), which consists of 128 cores (loosely based on the PPC A2 core) with a network-on-chip interconnect and no on-die L2 cache, running at 1.8GHz. The third is a 64MB eDRAM framebuffer/scratchpad. These three chips sit on the fourth component, an interposer which holds 256MB of eDRAM coherent cache which serves as the L2 for the co-processor and the L3 for the CPU.
The CPU does relatively standard CPU tasks like game logic, AI and soforth. The co-processor pulls double duty. The first is to calculate physics and transform animation data to the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) used for both physics and path-tracing. The second is to run the actual traces themselves. The A2-based cores are well suited for these purposes. They're 4-way multi-threaded, and make use of a quad-FPU set-up, which can operate either as four separate scalar FPUs, or a single 256-bit SIMD unit. This gives 512 total threads, and the mix of scalar and vector capabilities necessary for physics and path-tracing. The short pipeline should help as well, as pipeline bubbles can be a significant problem given the dependence on previous results while calculating the path-tracing. By bringing the cache off-die all 128 cores could be squeezed into a surprisingly small chip, and yet still have low-latency access to the huge cache necessary, due to IBM's stacking process. Further customisation of the cores, stripping unnecessary components and adding new instructions as necessary, would improve performance and perhaps allow them to squeeze even more cores onto the die.
In theory, Nintendo could actually ditch the traditional CPU entirely and go with a pure many-core architecture. The in-order architecture of the "co-processor" wouldn't be particularly efficient for things like AI, but could certainly brute-force the problem, and a single chip would give them the financial and thermal budget to really squeeze as many cores on as possible. It would be sort of like the idea to use the Cell as CPU+GPU in the PS3, but a bit more sensible, given the change in rendering paradigm.
With this SoC and let's say 32GB of RAM, the Wii V would be able to render using full path-tracing, and actually achieve "Pixar quality" graphics and astonishingly photo-realistic scenes. Your immediate reaction to this is probably "Nintendo would never do this, the Wii V will just be PS4.5!". There's an interesting path running through Nintendo's hardware choices, though, that suggests they may actually be first to go the path-tracing route, given the opportunity. Going from the Gamecube to Wii U, even including the DS and 3DS, Nintendo hasn't so much been conservative with hardware as being bullish with ease of development. They've talked about how they don't like developers having to make trade-offs between different technical aspects in development, they prefer for things to "just work". Hence why they favour fixed function graphical effects in GC, Wii and 3DS, and why there are reports of fixed function hardware in the Wii U GPU (for instance, have you noticed how almost every game built from the ground up for Wii U has a nice depth of field effect? It's very likely that's a dedicated hardware feature). Nintendo likes developers being able to just "turn on" an effect without having to worry about how it might work alongside all the other graphical features.
Well, path-tracing is the ultimate in "just works" graphics. Features that require complex trade-offs in rasterising engines, like anti-aliasing, global illumination, reflections, ambient occlusion, shadows, etc., etc. are all automatic with path-tracing. You don't have to reduce the quality of one to improve the quality of another. Path-tracing engines are also surprisingly simple to code compared to advanced rasterising engines, as you don't have to think of increasingly sophisticated ways to fake things, you just code the physical properties of light as they are. Path-tracing is ideally suited for a company who build their hardware around making things just work for developers.
The path-tracing revolution isn't actually that far off, either. Current real-time demos run surprisingly well on CPUs and GPUs that aren't designed with path-tracing in mind, and 6 years of development on dedicated hardware manufactured on a much smaller process should be able to produce good performance within a reasonable budget. It's also something that I'd expect to hit consoles first, as PC developers and manufacturers will have a common action problem; AMD and Nvidia will keep focussing their GPU designs on rasterising engines so long as almost all games are rendered with rasterising engines, and almost all games will be rendered with rasterising engines so long as PC and console GPUs are designed for rasterising. A new console generation, on the other hand, provides the perfect opportunity for this paradigm shift, and the Wii V might be in the perfect position to lead the change.
Anyway, hopefully my speculation is crazy enough to be interesting, and at the very least might be looked at in six years time and laughed upon for how wrong I got everything.
A long time ago in one of the Wii U speculation threads I talked a bit about ray-tracing/path-tracing, and how we might see consoles appear around 2020 with path-tracing GPUs designed by Intel (specifically an evolution of their Larabee/MIC/Xeon Phi line of many-core processors). It's occurred to me, though, that it might not be Intel who are best placed to create such path-tracing chips, but IBM instead.
In a nutshell, what you need to create a good path-tracing chip is a crapload of cores (which can be fairly bare-bones), and a big coherent cache. Intel's Xeon Phi co-processor (which is an evolution of the Larabee design) goes part-way to achieving this. It's got 50 cores and a fairly large coherent cache, and Intel have actually shown off path-tracing demos on the architecture. It does have a few limitations, though. For one, the use of the old P5 x86 architecture (intended to benefit its applications as a HPC co-processor) isn't ideal for the path-tracing problem. Secondly, its use of a ring bus will become a significant limitation as more cores are added.
The reason I've started to think about IBM as a potential creator of such a chip is a report I posted a week or so back which mentioned IBM's new 3D stacking tech which allows them to stack chips on top of a big chunk of eDRAM. By taking the cache off the die, it allows them to squeeze a lot more cores on there, and do some other interesting things besides. To illustrate, let's consider the SoC that could be at the heart of the Wii V, which we'll say launches in November 2018.
The Wii V's SoC consists of four main components, all manufactured on a 10nm process. The first is the CPU, a fairly standard, eight core out-of-order design running at 3.6GHz, with a moderate, but not huge L2 cache. The second is the co-processor (or GPU, if you will), which consists of 128 cores (loosely based on the PPC A2 core) with a network-on-chip interconnect and no on-die L2 cache, running at 1.8GHz. The third is a 64MB eDRAM framebuffer/scratchpad. These three chips sit on the fourth component, an interposer which holds 256MB of eDRAM coherent cache which serves as the L2 for the co-processor and the L3 for the CPU.
The CPU does relatively standard CPU tasks like game logic, AI and soforth. The co-processor pulls double duty. The first is to calculate physics and transform animation data to the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) used for both physics and path-tracing. The second is to run the actual traces themselves. The A2-based cores are well suited for these purposes. They're 4-way multi-threaded, and make use of a quad-FPU set-up, which can operate either as four separate scalar FPUs, or a single 256-bit SIMD unit. This gives 512 total threads, and the mix of scalar and vector capabilities necessary for physics and path-tracing. The short pipeline should help as well, as pipeline bubbles can be a significant problem given the dependence on previous results while calculating the path-tracing. By bringing the cache off-die all 128 cores could be squeezed into a surprisingly small chip, and yet still have low-latency access to the huge cache necessary, due to IBM's stacking process. Further customisation of the cores, stripping unnecessary components and adding new instructions as necessary, would improve performance and perhaps allow them to squeeze even more cores onto the die.
In theory, Nintendo could actually ditch the traditional CPU entirely and go with a pure many-core architecture. The in-order architecture of the "co-processor" wouldn't be particularly efficient for things like AI, but could certainly brute-force the problem, and a single chip would give them the financial and thermal budget to really squeeze as many cores on as possible. It would be sort of like the idea to use the Cell as CPU+GPU in the PS3, but a bit more sensible, given the change in rendering paradigm.
With this SoC and let's say 32GB of RAM, the Wii V would be able to render using full path-tracing, and actually achieve "Pixar quality" graphics and astonishingly photo-realistic scenes. Your immediate reaction to this is probably "Nintendo would never do this, the Wii V will just be PS4.5!". There's an interesting path running through Nintendo's hardware choices, though, that suggests they may actually be first to go the path-tracing route, given the opportunity. Going from the Gamecube to Wii U, even including the DS and 3DS, Nintendo hasn't so much been conservative with hardware as being bullish with ease of development. They've talked about how they don't like developers having to make trade-offs between different technical aspects in development, they prefer for things to "just work". Hence why they favour fixed function graphical effects in GC, Wii and 3DS, and why there are reports of fixed function hardware in the Wii U GPU (for instance, have you noticed how almost every game built from the ground up for Wii U has a nice depth of field effect? It's very likely that's a dedicated hardware feature). Nintendo likes developers being able to just "turn on" an effect without having to worry about how it might work alongside all the other graphical features.
Well, path-tracing is the ultimate in "just works" graphics. Features that require complex trade-offs in rasterising engines, like anti-aliasing, global illumination, reflections, ambient occlusion, shadows, etc., etc. are all automatic with path-tracing. You don't have to reduce the quality of one to improve the quality of another. Path-tracing engines are also surprisingly simple to code compared to advanced rasterising engines, as you don't have to think of increasingly sophisticated ways to fake things, you just code the physical properties of light as they are. Path-tracing is ideally suited for a company who build their hardware around making things just work for developers.
The path-tracing revolution isn't actually that far off, either. Current real-time demos run surprisingly well on CPUs and GPUs that aren't designed with path-tracing in mind, and 6 years of development on dedicated hardware manufactured on a much smaller process should be able to produce good performance within a reasonable budget. It's also something that I'd expect to hit consoles first, as PC developers and manufacturers will have a common action problem; AMD and Nvidia will keep focussing their GPU designs on rasterising engines so long as almost all games are rendered with rasterising engines, and almost all games will be rendered with rasterising engines so long as PC and console GPUs are designed for rasterising. A new console generation, on the other hand, provides the perfect opportunity for this paradigm shift, and the Wii V might be in the perfect position to lead the change.
Anyway, hopefully my speculation is crazy enough to be interesting, and at the very least might be looked at in six years time and laughed upon for how wrong I got everything.
Grampa Simpson
Banned
Wii V, Famicom 7 (7th console starting with the Famicom), Nintendo 8 (if you start with Color TV Game), or Nintendo's 9th Generation Console (if you go with Wikipedia Reckoning).
Fun huh.
I don't think they're going to revolutionize their base hardware. I think it's going to be an evolution of what they've been doing since the N64, and was refined in the GC. It's going to be a RISC processor stapled to a unified memory pool and a GPU that's descendent from what ART-X did all those years ago. Depending on how DD goes for them this generation, they may or may not make a shift away from optical media.
What process IBM and AMD use really isn't all that interesting.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Your post and the subject in general are intriguing, so I'll jump in. Lemme start from the tail, though.
You rightfully note that nintendo's hardware philosophy appears to be the opposite of 'quirky'. Their most quirky design ever, the N64, was meant to be a state-of-the-art 3d pipeline which turned out too costly, and thus all the quirks in it were results from BOM corner cutting. In contrast other vendors from that period had the craziest and non-conformant designs (from today's POV) - quadratic-patch rasterizers, lack of zbuffer, affine texture mapping - you name it. But Nintendo got right all that.
In this line of thinking, yes, path tracing (even with corner-cutting optimisations) is the ultimate 3d 'rasterizer' - it's as robust as they come. But it's still too expansive, at least in the SMP approach you're discussing. The way I see it, on one hand a CPU (in SMP) is too inefficient, whereas a GPU SIMD cluster is too restricted. Perhaps something closer to Epiphany, where a very efficient connectivity fabric is hosting 'spartan' RISC CPUs in large numbers, can bring down the cost of path tracing to commodity levels.
specialguy
Banned
Damn. Cold blooded.
While I feel BG is typically overly optimistic on Wii U, and I still think it's very unlikely anything like 600gflops or 640 SP's in Wii U GPU, or an e6760 or any DX11 GPU, he's actually fairly grounded compared to a lot of posters.
Actually come to think of it it does seem like when strong fans of a certain company feel, consciously or otherwise, that company is losing the console war, they turn into PC players rather than join the "enemy" lol. I seem to have noticed this with a lot of people on youtube switching to PC lately. (And I am not speaking about any of the big 3 companies in particular, could apply to any of them, just something I'd noticed)
Hey, I know you from your youtube infamy, lol.
Hey, that's actually a much better name than Wii U somehow, LOL.
Thank you.
Also, since we're at it, what exactly are the qualifications of this other beloved GAF insider 'Shocking Alberto'?
Since it's confession time, what you describe in the quote is what I did. But The Witcher 2 was enough of a good excuse, so I didn't need to accept the fact that I acted like a brand fanatic.
Let's face it, Wii U is another Wii case. It remains to be seen if all three companies will go that way for this gen.
Dude, please stay. It would be a big loss for GAF if a great poster like you would leave.
You aren't insinuating that BG is leaving because he thinks Nintendo is "losing the console war" before the system's even been released are you?...
You can face a delusion if you like, I'll face reality.
lwilliams3
Member
What is your definition of the "Wii case"?
Graphics Horse
Member
stylised cuboid with a disc slot at one end.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
2/10 charred pork chops.
Damn man, sad to see you leave, but it's been great reading your posts and discussing things with you. Hope you get things sorted and find success, and hope to see you again sometime next year
Epiphany was actually something that inspired my train of thought, I was thinking about something along the lines of a Power ISA version of it on top of a big eDRAM cache. IBM's stacking process and experience with RISC would make them well placed to put a load of relatively simple cores (A2 were the best base I could find, but of course they could be slimmed down quite a bit, for example double precision scalar FPUs are probably unnecessary) with a network-on-chip interconnect and yet still give them access to a big cache. Of course, they have even less experience with graphics hardware than Intel, but if a console maker was heavily involved in the design it could be feasible.
My friend, you are referring to a certificate of live birth. Certificates are people, too...
Bah, you're no fun
And the Wii U's GPU isn't descended from Flipper in any meaningful way, anyway.
I Stalk Alone
Member
Bah, you're no fun
And the Wii U's GPU isn't descended from Flipper in any meaningful way, anyway.
So Jaws or Shamu. I'm ok with this since flipper is weaksauce compared to the other two.
cyberheater
PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 Xbone PS4 PS4
So looking forward to the tear down.
Strangely enough, the two specs that are easiest to discern from a tear-down (RAM quantity and optical drive speed) are also the only two hard numbers Nintendo have released.
Yup, it's gonna be interesting. I'm personally most curious about seeing the cooling system. It could be very similar to the Wii's I guess, with just a simple heat sink slapped onto the board behind a fan, but perhaps the higher wattage and small enclosure could call for something more complex.