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IBM Announces Wii Chips In Nintendo Hands
simoniker writes "IBM has announced that the 'Broadway' CPUs created for the Nintendo Wii have been shipping from the company's East Fishkill, N.Y., fabrication facility since earlier this year. Nintendo, it would seem, is ramping up for the launch of their next-gen console in a month or two." Joystiq and Kotaku have the news as well. From the article: "Nintendo has also confirmed their reception of IBM's chip: 'The first chips are in our possession,' said Genyo Takeda, Senior Managing Director/General Manager, Integrated Research & Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd. 'Today's milestone marks the final stage of our drive to reach both core and nontraditional gamers with an inviting, inclusive and remarkable gaming experience.'"
I'm wondering whether or not the wimote will work with my setup. I have a tv card with a built-in mpeg decoder. So when I'm pointing the thing at my lcd monitor the raster information has been lost - no more timing signal at 60hz. Am I confused or does the wimote work in such a setup?
Shh.
Well, most analysts have predicted that the Wii would launch either mid-November (the 15th being thrown around a lot), November 1st, or sometime around Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. With this news that production has been going strong for almost two months, I think the earlier date is much more likely. If Nintendo can take advantage of a month's head start on the actual holiday season, it pretty much guarantees them second place worldwide behind the 360 until at least the end of summer 2007, and likely well into 2008. If the PS3 can't ship their 6 million before Nintendo ships theirs, it doesn't matter about demand. Plus, whichever console sees the most sales between November 2006 and March 2007 will undoubtedly get the most developer support, which will lead to an even stronger holiday season 2007. By January 1st 2008, the "winner" of this generation will have basically been decided. At that point, as we've seen with generations past, whoever has the most games wins.
Born to Play
The console wars are over before they even start. IBM wins.
Technically 10 seconds ago is "earlier this year".
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
that twenty years ago people said macintoshes were toy computers and ibm's were serious business machines. now macs use some stonkin intel processors and ibm processors are behind every next generation game console.
It's like Nintendo actually expects people to buy these things and doesn't need to limit the supply to make them sell out.. Crazy!
A little googling turns up the following info:
There's a really good Ars Technica article that breaks down the prices for the xbox360 and ps3.
xbox360: Xenon CPU $106, ATI GPU $141, total mfg cost $525 (the high end model)
ps3: Cell CPU $230, nVidia GPU $70, total mfg cost $800 (remember the debate? I think $350 for the BD-ROM is too high.)
Wii: there's no information out there on what components will cost. But the total price tag will be $250, and an educated guess says that only at most $125 of that can be the Broadway CPU and ATI GPU. Maybe Nintendo will sell the Wii as a loss leader, but they've never done that before.
Now, I'm going to use these specs which are unreliable, but speculation is all there is right now:
Total System Memory: 88 Mb RAM, 512 Mb Flash
Broadway CPU: 729 MHz
ATI GPU: 243 MHz
So the GPU probably has 32 Mb RAM or less. What this means is that it's equivalent to an ATI Radeon 9700, which fetches $30-$50 on eBay.
That leaves at most $95 for the CPU, and as little as $75. That's not a lot of money for a dual-core CPU. IBM's not going to make much money on Wii sales, and neither is Nintendo. On the other hand, Nintendo will probably make a killing when the economies of scale kick in and the prices come down. I could see the GPU dropping to $10, the CPU dropping to $50, etc.
Since this is just my speculating, I'd expect someone will reply with more info.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Give a man The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina Of Time and he will forget to eat for a day while his on-screen avatar goes fishing.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
"The closer you are to the bar, the higher the sensitivity."
Opposite, actually. Getting too close (within a couple feet) of the TV tends to make it hard for it to get exactly where you are pointing. I tried putting the Wiimote close to the TV to see if it helped me aim when I was playing it at E3, and when it made the pointer go nuts the representative told me that it loses sensitivity when you get that close and to stand back.
I could aim better from a distance.
oh, sorry - i misread the title...
Jesus Saves
It's no joke that the IC industry is dirty. Just ask the people who live there.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Meta will eat itself
To those unknowledgeable about the origins of the word, it sounded like New Yorkers had particularly horrific taste.
Dude, these numbers have been debunked, no one has any info on either the CPU, the GPU or the RAM, even Wikipedia doesn't use these numbers for god's sake!
Remember that the Wii only needs to go up to 480p/60fps (well all games are supposed to be 480p/60fps stable), the Xbox360 and the PS3 will range between 720p and 1080p. You need a lot of processing power for the rise in pixels alone. And the GC probably had the highest power of it's generation, only the lack of RAM made it extremely hard to reach it's best potential (just check RE4/GC).
I really doubt the Wii will be underpowered.
We'll just see, though.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
FTFA: According to the company, Silicon on Insulator technology from IBM helps deliver to Nintendo a generous improvement in processing power, while achieving a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption compared to the 'Gekko'.
Less energy consumption usually means less heat. If there is less heat could we be seeing a higher clocked version of the chip than the one shown at E3?
I wouldn't worry. I played Resident Evil 4 on my gamecube with Component video cables and progressive scan - the graphics are way better then anything I have seen on ps2 or xbox1, so if you soup up the cube abit and you're doing everything at 480p I bet it will look great
Worth pointing out that the "part of the G5 family" stuff is based upon Hannibal hearing a rumour that it was offered as a laptop equivalent of the G5. This, by itself, makes no sense whatsoever. It's a relatively recent chip, the main maker of PowerPC laptops is Apple, they wouldn't have been interested in a 729MHz G5 to replace their ~1.5GHz G4s, and if IBM did have a ~1.5GHz Broadway low-powered enough to be usable in a laptop, what the hell is Nintendo doing using a version that runs at half the speed?
Until now, all rumours have suggested it's simply a faster, better made, Gekko (which itself is derived from the G3, which is probably why the page you linked to redirects to the G3.) I think setting ones-self up for it being unbelievably more than that is probably setting ones-self up for disappointment.
The "It runs at 7xxMHz" and "It was offered as a laptop G5" "facts" clash. One of them has to be false. The 7xxMHz thing has been consistant and is the kind of thing developers would know about. Plus, Hannibal's reasoning for it being a major disappointment ("That it would make the Wii just an overclocked gamecube with a DVD player") is ridiculous. You might just as well call the Commodore 64 an overclocked KIM-I. Or the Nintendo DS an overclocked GBA.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
(Disclaimer: I have no factual basis whatsoever for the theory I'm about to spout. There's probably zero chance that this will come to pass, but it sure would be cool :)
/. (and elsewhere around the Intertron) on many occasions, Nintendo has some superficial parallels with Apple. Both companies offer products in their respective arenas that may not be the most powerful or the most feature-rich, but their products tend to be of the highest quality (and stylish, to boot). Focusing on doing a limited set of things, but doing those things well seems to be the modus operandi of both companies (see the iPod and the DS).
As has been pointed out here on
Nintendo is targeting the Wii at a new market. They're looking for casual gamers, older gamers, gamers who would not have even considered buying a console in the past. These are the buyers that Nintendo really wants to get the Wii to. Now, with the current console release model, companies announce the price and release date of the system many months in advance. This allows current gamers, who keep abreast of these things, to get in their pre-orders right away, essentially buying up all of the initial units right off the bat. The casual gamer generally can't get the system at launch even if they wanted to. If Nintendo wants to court the casual gamer with the Wii, they need to make sure that said casual gamer can actually buy one as soon as it launches.
Now take another look at Apple. When Apple is gearing up to release a new product, they don't make a peep about it ahead of time. They announce a press event a few weeks out, and then keep everything under wraps. Rumors leak out, of course, but that only serves to build up the all-important hype. Then, at the press event, the new products are announced, and immediately they're available on Apple's website and in their meatspace stores. No waiting. No preferential treatment for Apple fanboys. It's first-come, first-served.
With the news that Nintendo has already been receiving shipments one of the main components of the Wii, it's quite possible that the system could be launched very very soon (Joystiq, for example, has floated a rumor that it could be "within weeks" or "by the end of the month."). Perhaps Nintendo has decided to take a page from Apple's book again. Next week Nintendo has scheduled three nearly-simultaneous press events at three separate locations across the globe. As mentioned in my disclaimer above, I have no facts to back this up, but maybe... just maybe... Nintendo's going to do it exactly like Apple.
How cool would it be if next week Nintendo holds their press event, talks up the Wii, shows videos of all the launch games, etc, etc, and then at the end they announce, Jobs-like, that the system is available to purchase right now?
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." -- Groucho Marx
1) These chips won't be in PCs. They're a PowerPC derivitive and won't be running your x86 PC code. That being said its already possible to pickup sub-$100 CPUs if you aren't fixated on getting the fastest core out there. (Just like Nintendo didn't want the fastest possible core. They wanted good performance for low-cost)
2) I'd be surprised if someone didn't get Linux up and running on it but I doubt it'll be a common practice.
3) Yeah, Cell is definitely interesting to program since its parallelism is thrown right in your face. There's some compiler work that's been going on for a while to automate the process a little but I don't track it so I have no clue what its current status is (the last white paper I read seemed promising though). It will definitely be used by more than just game consoles & cgi graphics. Its already being applied to some medical imaging, radar and there was just an IBM announcement about an upcoming system for one of the government labs that will be using 16,000 Cells and 16,000 Opterons. It'll be the world's fastest computer when it's finished.
4) While the Xbox core can run general purpose code just fine it is definitely geared towards graphics much more than your standard PC. I don't have a link laying around but there are a few diagrams floating around online that show how the system is architected. The GPU is really the heart of the system with the CPU hanging off to the side - reversed from current PC architectures.
Could the Xbox core be used as a desktop part? Sure. Will it? Not likely. The momentum that would be required to completely rearchitect PCs is enormous (software & hardware would all have to change). This pretty much goes back to point #1.
Anyway. These views in no way represent IBM and I may be completely off-base.
Delays, delays, choices, perspectives, and more delays. Those in my view are big factors to market presence. Choices? Yes, should I buy this or should I buy that? It is not as simple as if should I buy a Wii over a PS3, or even an Xbox360? Maybe a new bicycle, monitor, or anything else worth a few hundred dollars, depending on season; that fishing reel was just an example of something _offtopic_ that may influence your buying pattern. Releasing a product the wrong season may be bad for your product's life cycle. And if Wii comes out before Thanksgiving it probably will start Q3 2008 with a better market presence than Sony will have. BTW, as was claimed in the article, Wii was shipped from Fishkill... Sounds darn close to a fishing reel to me, even if in essence wildly OT. :)