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WiiU "Latte" GPU Die Photo - GPU Feature Set And Power Analysis
- Thread starter Thraktor
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Trevelyan9999
Banned
I thought we were going to actually get somewhere fast with this photo? Isn't Fourth Storm coming back with some more concrete info in this?
Regardless, very exciting stuff today!
mugurumakensei
Member
Its customized by Nintendo. It matches no known architecture going by OP.
Is he up to date or does z0m3le strike again?
My theory is that the GPU logic on Wii U's GPU die is designed to provide GPU functionality. What exactly is your theory?
Spoiler tagged because this is totally off-topic, but:
Maybe I should have been more specific and said "steamed" milk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latte.
Either way the codename Latte is referring to that particular type of coffee drink, not to just milk.
Either way the codename Latte is referring to that particular type of coffee drink, not to just milk.
I'm having a real hard time wrapping my head around that kind of performance at that power draw.
This would make this the most efficient console ever created. I'm not sure I buy it.
Edit: Thraktor, not meaning to offend you or question your sensibilities, just that it seems like a high performance number given power draw and past (heck, even upcoming) architecture.
I think I'm just a tech fan erring on the low side of what I believe Nintendo would give us. I know they've been keen on customizing towards efficiency with the GC and Wii, but this SEEMS to be on another level given some of the data we have. I'd like to think you're closer to being right than USC-fan if it means anything.
I'm not a tech head, but someone else in the other topic said it would be feasable to get this chip down to about 18W after stripping some unnecessary stuff, without GDDR5 etc...
http://www.amd.com/la/Documents/AMD-Radeon-E6760-Discrete-GPU-product-brief.pdf
DragonSworne
Banned
It's the GameCube of this generation
Having an asymmetric shader/tmu/rop design should give it a lower TDP than having a uniform design.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
The pikmin are fed with tiiiiiiiny little icey pops.
Keeps things cool and on the down low.
It's not.
DOH! I was going off a failed memory when I looked at a die shot with overlayed diagram. Looking at the diagram again I can see it didn't show the ROPS.
Thanks.
Not sure if it's the same for all Wii U games is it, just no game and NSMBU?
DragonSworne
Banned
The system currently locks all games being played at 33-34w according to eurogamer
metalslimer
Member
By what metric?
Read Thraktor's analysis above
Read: Efficiency. Not so much the gap in horsepower.
Well, they're pretty much isolated/independent functions.
Indeed... Well, I think it's hard to say IMO.
DragonSworne
Banned
By the supposed theoretical GFLOP performance and the really world performance thanks to fix functions and efficiency.
Gamecube's gpu was theoretically 8 gflops while Xbox was 3 times more, yet they were on par in real world application.
DragonSworne
Banned
Version 3.0
Member
What kind of performance? We know it currently runs roughly equivalent PS3/360 games and we know the power draw. Unless it's already been maxed out by those early ports (which would also be unprecedented), it still has some theoretical performance gains to be had.
We may all be underwhelmed with its specs as they come to light, but maybe we should also be impressed by its efficiency.
Schnozberry
Member
It's possible if they have a poorly calibrated wattmeter. Iwata said in a Nintendo Direct that the Wii U would generally consume 45w, but there is overhead there for accessory power via USB and the SD Card reader and such.
Well, they're pretty much isolated/independent functions.
Sounds like a fair enough reason to me.
Baki
Member
So MS should sue them for using the secret sauce(tm) haha
It's not really wise to go down the road of "what ifs." There's no evident reason to doubt the figure.
No, don't get me wrong. Even at the theroized 176GFlops, I'm impressed with the results so far. The ports being as good as they are, given that, just makes what they built here that much more impressive IMO.
In any event, I've PMd Thraktor my clarification. Last thing I want is to seem like an unappreciative asshole.
Fourth Storm
Member
I may be crazy, but I think I may have zeroed in on the purpose of the 2 distinct eDRAM pools. The idea must have primarily sprung from the need for Wii BC and very low latencies. Follow me here...
You're trying to emulate the main pool of 24 MB 1t-SRAM from Flipper/Hollywood. Fine. You've got 32 MB of eDRAM to do that. That takes 3/4 of your allotted eDRAM. Now you've got 8 MB to emulate the additional 2 MB frame buffer and 1 MB texture RAM.
But you can't do it in 8 MB because that 1 MB of texture cache alone on Flipper was amazingly rigged to a 512-bit bus! This gave it not merely high (for then) bandwidth, but extremely low latency. If the 32 MB eDRAM is hooked up to a 2048-bit bus, then you're only left with a 512-bit bus left to share between the texture cache and the frame buffer.
Which leads to the proposed 4x1MB eDRAM modules on top. It's probably simply the smallest amount that Renesas could offer on a 512-bit bus. Or perhaps they figured a 4 MB texture cache could help them somehow in Wii U play more than 2 MB.
I'm probably completely off, but it stands to be refuted.
Edit: According to their website, Renesas were planning to sell 1 MB modules with 256 bit buses per piece, but you never know what's really available or financially sensible.
You're trying to emulate the main pool of 24 MB 1t-SRAM from Flipper/Hollywood. Fine. You've got 32 MB of eDRAM to do that. That takes 3/4 of your allotted eDRAM. Now you've got 8 MB to emulate the additional 2 MB frame buffer and 1 MB texture RAM.
But you can't do it in 8 MB because that 1 MB of texture cache alone on Flipper was amazingly rigged to a 512-bit bus! This gave it not merely high (for then) bandwidth, but extremely low latency. If the 32 MB eDRAM is hooked up to a 2048-bit bus, then you're only left with a 512-bit bus left to share between the texture cache and the frame buffer.
Which leads to the proposed 4x1MB eDRAM modules on top. It's probably simply the smallest amount that Renesas could offer on a 512-bit bus. Or perhaps they figured a 4 MB texture cache could help them somehow in Wii U play more than 2 MB.
I'm probably completely off, but it stands to be refuted.
Edit: According to their website, Renesas were planning to sell 1 MB modules with 256 bit buses per piece, but you never know what's really available or financially sensible.
DragonSworne
Banned
It's theorized to be 352glfops now though :/
I don't understand how the ports can perform worse when given more gflops and more ram... Only explanation is rushed products made by weaker dev units.
Schnozberry
Member
Nope. I don't think they're wrong. All that unidentified space on the GPU has to be doing something, though. Getting a full performance figure pretty much relies on figuring out what.
Glorified G
Member
There's more to it than just GFLOPS and ram amount. Ports could be bottlenecked by the cpu and ram speed.
Same goes for your 'gamecube of this gen' comparison. gflops doesn't tell the whole story.
You should realize why would nintendo have an interest in doing so, perhaps a changing market most don't realize is about to change a lot of dynamics. For nintendo shrinking things and merging both ends and then making products that tie in to that is much better than the status quo. Let them grow power from there anything else we end up with earlier situations and tons of money loss.
The ram isn't a bottleneck anymore (actually never was) so try again (you can only make a case for the cpu being a bottleneck of sorts).
If this is true, then wouldn't developers have 32+4MB of eDRAM to play with? Or am I missing something, completely?
EDIT: Another way to put it: Why would the additional 4MB be locked off for Wii U game development?
Fourth Storm
Member
Yes, it would basically be like a modern Flipper. Like most other modern chips, bandwidth and size have increased much more than latency has decreased. However, the latency is still much reduced and obviously a focus.
Right folks, it's late here and I'm off to bed. I've cleaned up the OP a bit, and I expect lots of newly deciphered info for it by the time I wake up tomorrow
Good night, sweet prince.
Elfforkusu
Member
Well, a new, unknown architecture can be quite the "bottleneck", in particular if you're on a tight budget with limited time.
Nostremitus
Member
That 352 isn't counting any proposed fixed-function assistance afaik. The number you quoted was a knee-jerk response thrown out before the chip had even begun to be analyzed properly.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
For all Nintendo has denied, for the moment, plans to merge their console and handheld divisions in a literal sense, I have to think that option is absolutely on their mind. And would be one side benefit of their current strategy.
I think it's been hard to get a grasp on what might actually be going on here, because everything surrounding the situation has been drowned out by cries of how dumb, cheap, and incompetent Nintendo is. (For not having dropped everything to make a super computer in a box and lose a few hundred a unit on.)
Nintendo might be frugal (to say the least), but whether they're being dumb, or merely playing dumb, remains to be seen.
I just realized this. The smaller block of EDRAM is apparently of a greater density and higher bandwidth than the larger block. Why would that 4MB be higher speed than the larger pool of 32MB?--especially if it was put in there [primarily] because of the Wii emulation?
And what are the consequences for WiiU games? How much faster would this be?
Well from the Q&A answer on top of the investor presentation stuff it definitely seems like it was referring to just the software side to me. I wouldn't take that as having anything necessarily to do with hardware, other than portable hardware becoming more capable and these days (i.e. supporting the same shaders or whatever 3D APIs and stuff as the console hardware). I figure they're working on a middleware or some standardized higher level dev setup to work with to make development faster and more portable down the line.
If I'm right it seems like something that should've been done long ago, but I guess the 3DS and Wii U are their first systems to be modern enough for them to consider it, plus it sounds like they ran into some of the development hurdles everyone else did with the HD transition (...except a few years later).
From the investor stuff it sounds like the finalized dev kits weren't out until around Q3 so I imagine a lot of stuff was rushed, on top of the hardware being completely different. Standard crappy launch stuff basically, albeit without the usual generational big performance overhead to easily mask issues.
Might be possible for a dev to make their own benchmarks to test this or that perhaps, or ideally there'd be some documented performance metrics for everything in the documentation so they know what to expect rather than having to test things out themselves.
Fourth Storm
Member
It's a higher speed for its size, not overall. But it should be extremely low latency even relative to the 32 MB MEM1.
Why aren't we considering that it could be used to both help with Wii emulation and to further lessen the impact of the ddr3 bandwidth?
Then why does the diagram from Chipworks refer to the larger pool as "slower"? Same reason (for its size, not overall)? I don't mean to sound antagonistic--I'm genuinely curious.
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