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Anandtech Wii U Teardown

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6465/nintendo-wii-u-teardown

Not very much new info, but it gets opened up and some basic benchmarks are run.

mcmsmzeow8.jpg


There are actually three components on this single package, made in at least two different microprocessor fabs. The multicore PowerPC based CPU is the smaller of the two larger chips. This die is made on IBM's 45nm SOI process. The RV7xx derived GPU is the biggest die on the package, and I'm presuming it was made on a 40nm process. I'm assuming the very tiny die in the corner is actually some off-chip memory. Both the CPU and GPU in the Wii U are supposed to have some eDRAM, although the bulk of it is likely dedicated for the GPU.

wii_u_power2dpav.png


XxkDL.png
 

Durante

Member
There are four 4Gb (512MB) Hynix DDR3-800 devices surrounding the Wii U's MCM (Multi Chip Module). Memory is shared between the CPU and GPU, and if I'm decoding the DRAM part numbers correctly it looks like these are 16-bit devices giving the Wii U a total of 6.4GB/s of peak memory bandwidth.
Anand can no longer correctly calculate memory bandwidth?

33 Watt in-game (though it's just NSMBU) is miniscule.
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
Isn't this just pretty much what was confirmed in the other thread?
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
Well I'll compliment the design. Seems pretty efficient, should be able to manufacture for cheap.
 

tenchir

Member
The eDRAM has to be in the neighborhood of 32MB(24MB minimum), otherwise it couldn't emulate the Wii's 1T-SRAM with it's really low latency(6ns?) with the 1GB DDR3. I expect that that embedded RAM to have pretty high bandwidth to compensate for the low BW of the main RAM.
 

Osiris

I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
There are four 4Gb (512MB) Hynix DDR3-800 devices surrounding the Wii U's MCM (Multi Chip Module). Memory is shared between the CPU and GPU, and if I'm decoding the DRAM part numbers correctly it looks like these are 16-bit devices giving the Wii U a total of 6.4GB/s of peak memory bandwidth.

Wait... DDR3-800?

Seriously?
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
Wait... DDR3-800?

Seriously?

Yup. Crazy isn't it? Intel Nehalem used this back in 2007...for system CPU not for video.

I know a lot of Nintendo enthusiasts are blaming rushed ports, but do they expect UE3 to be recoded for a CPU and video ram that's slower than 7 year old consoles?
 
Didn't the other thread say 17GB/s? This is significantly slower.

His math is off by half. The possible range based on the chip markers is between 12.8GB/s and that 17GB/s figure. PC Perspective found Samsung chips, while Anand says he is looking at Hynix. It's possible Nintendo used multiple suppliers, and the Hynix chips Anand found may imply an actual clock speed on the low end of that scale, but we can't be sure.
 
Don't take it from me if you don't want too.

Source.

Oh, I see where the confusion is coming from. The number in DDR3-xxx doesn't correspond to the frequency the chips are running at. So yes, DDR3-1600 runs at 800MHz, but Anandtech is saying it uses DDR3-800 which runs at 400MHz and would be 6.4GB/s.

edit: So either Anandtech meant to say DDR3-1600 or it's DDR3-800. Either way, it's bad.
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
This system will be a disaster in the long run.

A touch of hyperbole considering it's day one, don't you think?

We've had four straight instances (2 console, 2 handheld) where a weaker system was the most popular and produced good libraries of games, and we're calling it a "disaster" on day one?
 
A touch of hyperbole considering it's day one, don't you think?

We've had four straight instances (2 console, 2 handheld) where a weaker system was the most popular and produced good libraries of games, and we're calling it a "disaster" on day one?
I am not sure even if Wii was less powerful than Xbox in general; and then again, Wii launched at 250 with a game.
 
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