Even if that was more than wishful thinking, the point remains that it's a tiny fraction of the memory. 1.5% of your total. Even if it can be used for anything but framebuffer, it still can't be used for much else. The thing you refer to as Gamecube's MEM1 OTOH is main memory, 57% of the total, usable for a majority of things. That's why your comparison is off either way.Sure, because MEM1 is no framebuffer.
You should compare WiiU eDRAM to Flipper/Broadway eDRAM. Flipper eDRAM is 4.7% of the total in Gamecube, 2.2% in Wii. Flipper eDRAM provides 18GB/s bandwidth, 6x faster than its main memory. See how this comparison makes way more sense?
Gamecube ARAM was little more than a glorified disc streaming buffer, too slow to be useful for anything but that and audio. Expanding it in the Wii to the point where it became the biggest pool was a crutch to get the total up, and only happened because Nintendo was already in full-on penny-pinching mode.wsippel said:The MEM1/ MEM2 hierarchy is an obvious evolution of the main RAM/ aux RAM concept. ARAM/ MEM2 became much bigger, but also much faster over the years compared to MEM1, but the idea still is to have very fast memory for highly performance critical stuff and "mass storage" for everything else. Is 32MB enough? No idea, but MEM2 certainly doesn't need to be bigger than MEM1 with current workloads.
But we won't be holding up the Wii as an example of a performance balanced system to begin with.