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[guek]

I would be very very happy with those specs, but alas they are almost certain to be fake. There's enough to make it seem feasible but also enough bits that are out of character for nintendo to cast a fair amount of doubt.

Goddamnit, this week is going to be torture. I hope they open up their conference like they did back in 2006 with just a montage of gameplay footage with game after game being shown in glorious HD detail.

 

[Gamer @ Heart]

So it practical terms, is that speed is way more valuable to delevopers than just doubling DDR5?. And the power draw is valuable to Nintendo to offset the power needed for some other part correct?

 

[TekkenMaster]

RAM HISTORY

NES = 20 KB
SNES = 128 KB (6.4x jump)
Nintendo 64 = 4 MB (32x jump)
GameCube = 43 MB (10.75x jump)
Wii = 88 MB (2x jump)

Xbox = 64 MB
360 = 512 MB (8x jump)

PS1 = 3 MB
PS2 = 36 MB (12x jump)
PS3 = 512 MB (14x jump)

So going by each company's history:

Xbox 720 will have 8 * 512 = 4 GB RAM
PS4 will have 13 * 512 = 6.5 GB RAM
Nintendo will have 12.8 * 88 = 1.1 GB of RAM

Sounds about right, no?

 

[Father_Brain]

From memory... a few weeks prior to Nintendo's last investor's meeting Nintendo issued a small statement responding to the various rumours that had started spreading, confirming they had a new home console ready and their intention to reveal at E3 (like the 3DS last year.) They also said there would be more info in the coming weeks, and people thought this meant they might reveal some things at the investor's meeting.

Of course, they didn't really say anything there. Except that it existed again and that they would reveal at E3 again.

There was nothing said about the "coming weeks," only that more would be revealed at E3 and that a "playable model" would be shown there.

 

[Cow Mengde]

These next 8 days (okay slightly less now) will be torture.

Even when we're at E3, I doubt Nintendo will give out the specs.

 

[herzogzwei1989]

I'm just counting it as 5 more days of work (the rest of this week and next Monday).
Plus, Monday night we'll get the eShop for the 3DS, which will help to tide me over until the conference.

Forgot all about the eShop for 3DS, awesome.

 

[Hylian]

I love those fakes. So pathetic. This one is great!
Lovely low jpeg compression, careless use of words we never see in actual facts sheet like "internal use only", "theorical", "Custom AMD", and, on a more abstract way, an author who in barely 10 years of Nintendo difference never understood the sentence "we does not announce the specs because it really doesn't matter" and/or produced his fake by melting developers oriented specs like the actual chipset reference with consumer/press oriented fact specs with mentions of backward compatibility and SD Card use.

Well if you put it that way . But still im not 101% fully convinced. Gime me the final blow detective GAF. Othervice im back in to the speculation mode , again.

 

[antonz]

So it practical terms, is that speed is way more valuable to delevopers than just doubling DDR5?. And the power draw is valuable to Nintendo to offset the you or some other part correct?

XDR2 would without a doubt be a Nintendo style way of approaching ram. Super fast in a smaller quantity but the smaller quantity can offer the bandwidth of a larger quantity of slower ram.

 

[AceBandage]

So it practical terms, is that speed is way more valuable to delevopers than just doubling DDR5?. And the power draw is valuable to Nintendo to offset the you or some other part correct?

Lower power draw = less heat
Higher bandwidth = Faster loading

Having less good RAM is better than having more crappy RAM.

RAM HISTORY

NES = 20 KB
SNES = 128 KB (6.4x jump)
Nintendo 64 = 4 MB (32x jump)
GameCube = 43 MB (10.75x jump)
Wii = 88 MB (2x jump)

Xbox = 64 MB
360 = 512 MB (8x jump)

PS1 = 3 MB
PS2 = 36 MB (12x jump)
PS3 = 512 MB (14x jump)

So going by each company's history:

Xbox 720 will have 8 * 512 = 4 GB RAM
PS4 will have 13 * 512 = 6.5 GB RAM
Nintendo will have 12.8 * 88 = 1.1 GB of RAM

Sounds about right, no?

I'd be shocked if any of the systems have more than 2.5GB of RAM, honestly.

 

[Rich!]

I'm just counting it as 5 more days of work (the rest of this week and next Monday).
Plus, Monday night we'll get the eShop for the 3DS, which will help to tide me over until the conference.

I get the conference the same day as everyone else, but where I'm staying until the 15th has pretty gimped internet (public hotspot). I doubt I'll be able to connect my 3DS, damnit.

 

[herzogzwei1989]

Even when we're at E3, I doubt Nintendo will give out the specs.

Probably true, but we will have at least some idea of the ballpark specs based on what we see running in games and possibly demos.

 

[Truth101]

RAM HISTORY

NES = 20 KB
SNES = 128 KB (6.4x jump)
Nintendo 64 = 4 MB (32x jump)
GameCube = 43 MB (10.75x jump)
Wii = 88 MB (2x jump)

Xbox = 64 MB
360 = 512 MB (8x jump)

PS1 = 3 MB
PS2 = 36 MB (12x jump)
PS3 = 512 MB (14x jump)

So going by each company's history:

Xbox 720 will have 8 * 512 = 4 GB RAM
PS4 will have 13 * 512 = 6.5 GB RAM
Nintendo will have 12.8 * 88 = 1.1 GB of RAM

Sounds about right, no?

This has nothing to do with the the RAM amounts of next-gen systems.

A design team does not look at the past iterations of a console and say hey let's double, triple ect... the RAM.

A design team has a specific performance goal in relation to development and retail cost and their goal is to get the most performance at the estimated costs of retail/development.

 

[antonz]

Release of Specs would depend entirely on how far they go with the system. They make it apowerhouse and they are likely more willing to talk. As has been pointed out they had no issue posting every single detail of the gamecubes specs back in the day

 

[Jinfash]

One of my favorite things about console reveals is to look back and see which rumors got it right/was the closest, then read the reaction of posters towards them.

 

[swerve]

Forgot all about the eShop for 3DS, awesome.

Right now, due to the FACTS of it, I am way more excited about the eShop. My 3DS is going to become indispensable, in just a matter of a few downloads and my DSiWare transfer.

 

[Fourth Storm]

I remember a few weeks back Brain Stew did some ridiculous calculations based on some esoterica of past Nintendo system power leaps and came up with exactly 1.5 GB of RAM for Cafe.

That was some Revelation style shit right there...

 

[herzogzwei1989]

At 1.398 TFLOPs, the WOLF GPU would be 5.8x more powerful than Xbox 360's Xenos, in terms of floating point / compute performance.

 

[swerve]

One of my favorite things about console reveals is to look back and see which rumors got it right/was the closest, then read the reaction of posters towards them.

Yup. Always fun to see where we got it wrong. That leak looks fake to me because I've never seen a comparable document from any other system. It's not the proposed specs that put me off.

And the choice of details - and what is left out - makes it a little too convenient. No mention of the streaming/networking/wi-fi or the controller.

 

[AceBandage]

I remember a few weeks back Brain Stew did some ridiculous calculations based on some esoterica of past Nintendo system power leaps and came up with exactly 1.5 GB of RAM for Cafe.

That was some Revelation style shit right there...

I don't think it was brain_stew. Someone else came up with the fact that Nintendo followed some weird 18x power increments or something.
It's an interesting theory, though.
b_s, however, has stated he thinks 1.5GB is what Nintendo will shoot for, because it'll be cheaper for them.

 

[blu]

Wasn't the GC/Wii just a Power3 chip? (and didn't Power3 have standard OoOE?)

Not sure what your idea of 'standard' OoOE is, but PPC G3 (aka PPC750) is barely out-of-order in modern terms, e.g. PPC970, power7, core, etc. architectures. If I were to put it bluntly, G3 was the link between in-order and modern out-of-order designs. Basically, it was out-of-order, but in so quantitatively-limited ways, that it really pales when placed next to a current OoOE design.

 

[Death Dealer]

So it has 512 MB of main ram, and 1 gig of Video RAM.

Isn't that pretty damn good, in comparison to the 360/PS3?

If the spec sheet it true, it's going to be hard for me to take a wait and see attitude. I'm so ready for next gen to begin, I'll camp for Cafe.

1gb of vram is a big difference compared to PS3 and 360. It should be able to do PC quality textures. x6 the video performance will put it comfortably in the lead for now and will allow down ports of future games made for the 2013-2014 next gen consoles that could be x10-15 the video performance of 7th generation. I think it's at the point to where a next gen console doesn't need a x10 leap in system memory capacity, so I think 512mb sounds like enough to get by. All it needs to do is play a game, not run 5 business programs and photoshop at the same time. I think next gen PS and Xbox will try and be even more like a hybrid PC-Console-Entertainment Media Device, and so they will need more system ram. I hope they have at least 1gb sys, and 1.5-2gb of vram.

 

[Jocchan]

RAM HISTORY

NES = 20 KB
SNES = 128 KB (6.4x jump)
Nintendo 64 = 4 MB (32x jump)
GameCube = 43 MB (10.75x jump)
Wii = 88 MB (2x jump)

Xbox = 64 MB
360 = 512 MB (8x jump)

PS1 = 3 MB
PS2 = 36 MB (12x jump)
PS3 = 512 MB (14x jump)

So going by each company's history:

Xbox 720 will have 8 * 512 = 4 GB RAM
PS4 will have 13 * 512 = 6.5 GB RAM
Nintendo will have 12.8 * 88 = 1.1 GB of RAM

Sounds about right, no?

Entirely pointless, this is not how you design hardware.

I remember a few weeks back Brain Stew did some ridiculous calculations based on some esoterica of past Nintendo system power leaps and came up with exactly 1.5 GB of RAM for Cafe.

That was some Revelation style shit right there...

I'm pretty sure it wasn't brain_stew, but anyway it wasn't an entirely serious post.

Yup. Always fun to see where we got it wrong. That leak looks fake to me because I've never seen a comparable document from any other system. It's not the proposed specs that put me off.

And the choice of details - and what is left out - makes it a little too convenient. No mention of the streaming/networking/wi-fi or the controller.

The leak is almost certainly fake for a number of reasons already stated in this thread, but the people making it sure did their homework.

 

[Fourth Storm]

I don't think it was brain_stew. Someone else came up with the fact that Nintendo followed some weird 18x power increments or something.
It's an interesting theory, though.
b_s, however, has stated he thinks 1.5GB is what Nintendo will shoot for, because it'll be cheaper for them.

It was pretty interesting. I wish I could find it to give the author proper credit. I can't even think of what I would search for though.

 

[ombz]

Am I the only one that didn't know what a D-terminal was?

 

[bgassassin]

Your earlier post lacked much detail. I'm supposed to know everything you just wrote implied off your meandering first post ?

I think Nintendo is breaking from the past with Cafe. They're going closer to mainstream with the Cafe. As they say hw is designed like a buffed up X360. I doubt there will be any architecture spill over from the ancient GC and Wii hw designs.

I think the detail was fine, but the errors I made dealing with the embedded side (which I have no problem admitting) may have thrown you off. But at the same time it's not my fault you took the GDDR5 to strictly mean VRAM when MS and Nintendo used GDDR3 as main memory. I didn't think I needed to mention previous consoles' architecture and just posted as that part already being understood. And meandering is an opinion since all I did was pose multiple views on my opinion, but you didn't see what I was saying from the get go so I can see why you view it as meandering. Anyway I apologize for any of the misunderstandings.

I also don't think Nintendo will totally abandon the GC/Wii architecture. I won't be shocked if they do, but I get the feeling they have built-in profitability with that setup and will just make it more powerful this time around. So to better clarify my view on what Nintendo will go with memory-wise I see it being like this:

Minimum total system memory - 896MB GDDR5 + 128MB 1T-SRAM = 1024MB
embedded 1T-SRAM - 16-32MB

 

[herzogzwei1989]

Hopefully the real Cafe isn't too far off from these probably fake specs.

If Cafe is *much* weaker, I think many of us will be disappointed, it's only natural.

 

[Dreamwriter]

Let's see how many signs of fakery we can find!

• Overly compressed - a plain page with mostly solid colors and text won't need to be compressed enough to be noticeable for any reason I can think of.
• Corners are curved - what technical writer would go to the effort of using an art tool to curve the corners of a data sheet for developers?
• "for internal use only" - all lower case, and why would Nintendo print for internal use in a doc they are giving to external developers in Germany? And why is this even in English? A German developer would either get the original Japanese or a German doc (at this point, I doubt docs would be translated into anything but Japanese anyways)
• "Project Cafe" in quotes - Nintendo doesn't put quotes around early names
• "Final Specifications" - there is no such thing with Nintendo until a system launches. Things change in small ways up until start of production (and even after that the firmware can still change)
• "Devkit 1.3" - Nintendo uses names for their dev kits, they don't get version numbers. And the "final" version of a dev kit (the 1.0 version) wouldn't be out for quite a number of months after official announcement to the public. The SDK gets version numbers, but that would be "SDK". And if I remember right they don't hit 1.0 until Nintendo thinks everything is complete, which would be shortly before or after system launch.
• Information too generic about some things, yet too detailed about others - this isn't a good data sheet for a developer. A developer doesn't need to know things like what model of GPU the system uses, and Nintendo wouldn't list it on a data sheet like this. Nor would speed ratings be of any use whatsoever. Games aren't programmed or designed around theoretical speed ratings. And Nintendo doesn't give information to developers if they don't need it. And the video RAM numbers given are useless, way too vague, it doesn't explain how the video RAM is divided up.
• "Custom Blu-Ray Disc"? Nintendo would say something like "50GB optical disc storage", they wouldn' use a brand name, just like they never said the Game Cube used "custom DVD's". Nor would they give any compatibility information, developers don't need to know any of that.

That's enough for now...

 

[AceBandage]

Am I the only one that didn't know what a D-terminal was?

Since it's pretty much Japan only, it's not a surprise.

 

[herzogzwei1989]

I also don't think Nintendo will totally abandon the GC/Wii architecture. I won't be shocked if they do, but I get the feeling they have built-in profitability with that setup and will just make it more powerful this time around. So to better clarify my view on what Nintendo will go with memory-wise I see it being like this:

I tend to disagree, at least somewhat. The GCN/Wii architecture dates back to the late 1990s when GCN was designed (CPU, GPU). It's about time Nintendo moves on to modern CPU, GPU architectures. Nintendo cannot keep reusing it again & again.

 

[Guerrillas in the Mist]

Man, it's going to be awesome looking back at this thread once we E3 hits (provided we get more than a sliver of info at E3)

 

[blu]

Let's see how many signs of fakery we can find!

<snip>
That's enough for now...

Dreamwriter, thanks for the breakdown, but I don't think anybody here was taking this 'leak' as legit. People have just been entertaining the thought of said leak being close to actual specs.

 

[Gravijah]

Man, it's going to be awesome looking back at this thread once we E3 hits (provided we get more than a sliver of info at E3)

We'll see graphics and then people will speculate on what is producing said graphics.

 

[TekkenMaster]

I remember a few weeks back Brain Stew did some ridiculous calculations based on some esoterica of past Nintendo system power leaps and came up with exactly 1.5 GB of RAM for Cafe.

That was some Revelation style shit right there...

Actually, if I leave out the 2x jump in RAM from Gamecube to Wii (which is a weird outlier), then that gives me 1.442 GB of RAM for Cafe.

So now my calculations as well as Brain Stews' both predict approx. 1.5 GB.

It WILL happen.

 

[herzogzwei1989]

We'll see graphics and then people will speculate on what is producing said graphics.

Indeed.

 

[Smiles and Cries]

Let's see how many signs of fakery we can find!

• Overly compressed - a plain page with mostly solid colors and text won't need to be compressed enough to be noticeable for any reason I can think of.
• Corners are curved - what technical writer would go to the effort of using an art tool to curve the corners of a data sheet for developers?
• "for internal use only" - all lower case, and why would Nintendo print for internal use in a doc they are giving to external developers in Germany? And why is this even in English? A German developer would either get the original Japanese or a German doc (at this point, I doubt docs would be translated into anything but Japanese anyways)
• "Project Cafe" in quotes - Nintendo doesn't put quotes around early names
• "Final Specifications" - there is no such thing with Nintendo until a system launches. Things change in small ways up until start of production (and even after that the firmware can still change)
• "Devkit 1.3" - Nintendo uses names for their dev kits, they don't get version numbers. And the "final" version of a dev kit (the 1.0 version) wouldn't be out for quite a number of months after official announcement to the public. The SDK gets version numbers, but that would be "SDK". And if I remember right they don't hit 1.0 until Nintendo thinks everything is complete, which would be shortly before or after system launch.
• Information too generic about some things, yet too detailed about others - this isn't a good data sheet for a developer. A developer doesn't need to know things like what model of GPU the system uses, and Nintendo wouldn't list it on a data sheet like this. Nor would speed ratings be of any use whatsoever. Games aren't programmed or designed around theoretical speed ratings. And Nintendo doesn't give information to developers if they don't need it. And the video RAM numbers given are useless, way too vague, it doesn't explain how the video RAM is divided up.
• "Custom Blu-Ray Disc"? Nintendo would say something like "50GB optical disc storage", they wouldn' use a brand name, just like they never said the Game Cube used "custom DVD's". Nor would they give any compatibility information, developers don't need to know any of that.

That's enough for now...

I'll make it easier. The image is fake but the specs are real just not using normal Nintendo terms so I would say this is as real a leak as we could have gotten

BELIEVE!

 

[Fernando Rocker]

We'll see graphics and then people will speculate on what is producing said graphics.

Fairy dust?

 

[Hylian]

At 1.398 TFLOPs, the WOLF GPU would be 5.8x more powerful than Xbox 360's Xenos, in terms of floating point / compute performance.

That would also mean that nintendo would the ps2 of next gen , in terms of computational power compared to its rivals.

 

[Dreamwriter]

I tend to disagree, at least somewhat. The GCN/Wii architecture dates back to the late 1990s when GCN was designed (CPU, GPU). It's about time Nintendo moves on to modern CPU, GPU architectures. Nintendo cannot keep reusing it again & again.

This one's an interesting case. For handhelds Nintendo kept things very similar from the original black and white Gameboy all the way up through the DSi. It was the 3DS that really changed the way the system gets programmed, for the first time in Nintendo handheld history. So Nintendo does have a history of keeping things fairly similar for long periods of time (it makes it easier for developers to learn the new system), BUT they just completely switched things up with the 3DS, so we now have a recent example of them dropping the old dated architecture.

 

[AceBandage]

We'll see Anthony Higgs kicking alien ass and then people will speculate on what is producing Anthony Higgs kicking alien ass.

That's closer to reality.

 

[herzogzwei1989]

I'd still be fine with Cafe having just 1 GB for everything, plus some embedded memory on the GPU.

 

[bgassassin]

I tend to disagree, at least somewhat. The GCN/Wii architecture dates back to the late 1990s when GCN was designed (CPU, GPU). It's about time Nintendo moves on to modern CPU, GPU architectures. Nintendo cannot keep reusing it again & again.

Yeah like I said I won't be shocked if they do change, but Nintendo has two consistent things they follow.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

"If it is broke, try it a little longer till we know for sure."

 

[AceBandage]

Yeah like I said I won't be shocked if they do change, but Nintendo has two consistent things they follow.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

"If it is broke, try it a little longer till we know for sure."

Wii architecture is broken, though.
It's hard to program for and not as efficient as modern technology.

 

[Smiles and Cries]

That would also mean that nintendo would the ps2 of next gen , in terms of computational power compared to its rivals.

I think we all can agree Project Cafe will be the weakest among its rivals in a year or so after launch. Who would ever doubt that?

 

[herzogzwei1989]

I do believe Nintendo will have a totally new (compared to GCN/Wii) CPU and GPU this time. The only reason to keep the old architectures would be for BC, but that shouldn't be a problem if they use the same CPU and GPU providers (IBM and AMD/ATI).

 

[blu]

I'd still be fine with Cafe having just 1 GB for everything, plus some embedded memory on the GPU.

Let's put it this way: I'd be really surprised if Cafe's GPU did not have some blazingly fast fb mem pool, given how they've been sticking to UMA + fast fb for the past two generations (ok, 1.5 generations : ) Same design carried on by xb360, which nintendo allegedly plan to keep parity with. The only reason I can think of them not going fast-fb would be money.

Actually, scratch that reason, as it may not be even valid ; )

 

[Fourth Storm]

I'll make it easier. The image is fake but the specs are real just not using normal Nintendo terms so I would say this is as real a leak as we could have gotten

BELIEVE!

Of course, once the creator got the core specs from his friend, he felt compelled to create the image, because nobody would believe him otherwise.

 

[herzogzwei1989]

Let's put it this way: I'd be really surprised if Cafe's GPU did not have some blazingly fast fb mem pool, given how they've been sticking to UMA + fast fb for the past two generations (ok, 1.5 generations : ) Same design carried on by xb360, which nintendo allegedly plan to keep parity with. The only reason I can think of them not going fast-fb would be money.

So you think there will be embedded memory. Good. I think it's important to offset relatively low main memory bandwidth. The Xbox 360 certainly needed it, the main memory bandwidth was only 22.4 GB/sec IIRC.


Anyway

Any idea how many transistors 16 MB eDRAM would take up?

The GameCube had 3.12 MB of embedded 1T-SRAM on Flipper (Wii's Hollywood has the same) and that took up around half of Flipper's 51M transistors. I also remember that IGN said Dolphin would have between 8 and 16 MB of embedded RAM on Flipper.

http://cube.ign.com/articles/068/068223p1.html
http://cube.ign.com/articles/081/081328p1.html

That was before GameCube was revealed at Spaceworld 2000. I remember being shocked at the low 3.12 MB that was announced.

16MB of embedded RAM on Cafe's GPU seems reasonable, I hope it proves to be true, though I'm not counting on it.

 

[bgassassin]

Wii architecture is broken, though.
It's hard to program for and not as efficient as modern technology.

So now you just hope they know that for sure. I love 'em, but Nintendo is bad about finding ways to gimp themselves. While some might feel I have high expectations, the fact that Nintendo has a history of doing that is what keeps me in check. I expect Cafe will be easily more powerful than PS360, but there will be something done (could be the controller for all we know) that puts a dent in the positive of being more powerful. I'm personally expecting a "Super Wii" so to speak. It mimics the Wii setup with more powerful components to blow by the current HD twins.

 

[Hylian]

I think we all can agree Project Cafe will be the weakest among its rivals in a year or so after launch. Who would ever doubt that?

Well i was more referring to it as a good thing to be the ps2 of next gen. In a sence that people have been claiming the cafe to be only half generational leap compared to the Super HD twins. The stated numbers in turn would make it so close to what MS and Sony can be able to put forward next gen in terms of computational power. That it would be practically fully in the same generation , in the same way that ps2 fully part of the generation of its contemporary rival systems.

 

[antonz]

I think its safe to say the GC/Wii line of processors is dead for next gen. The chip they were based on could only rate to around the level the Wii is at now.