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The Wii's Brain Exposed
Jon Stokes, at the Opposable Thumbs column, discusses a final revelation of the Wii's technical prowess. Though it's been assumed since the early days of the marketing push that the Wii is basically a super-charged GameCube, a post to Acer's Hardware boards would seem to confirm that. Not, as Mr. Stokes says, that that is a bad thing: "I'm no longer nearly as upset about the implications of this move as I was back in August. In fact, thanks in large part to my DS Lite, I've gone from being disappointed at Wii's underpowered hardware to actually anticipating the new console. I plan to pick one up when they become generally available, and I'm even hoping to hook my (nongamer) wife on it."
...and I'll say it again. The Wii doesn't need to be much faster to look good.
The difference in required processing power to properly render the larger textures and more detailed models at 1080p versus what the Wii needs to do at 480p is huge. All that processing power that Microsoft and Sony will throw into 1920*1080=2073600 pixel is going to be much more than Nintendo has to worry about at 640*480=307200
2073600/307200 = 6.75. Sony and Microsoft need to be 6.75 times as powerful as Nintendo's console to maintain the status quo.
Now obviously this is likely to be wildly inaccurate. There are all sorts of factors I know jack about. However, the point remains that Sony and Microsoft's consoles have to go to a much greater effort to keep those framerates up.
On an HD TV, the Wii's graphics will look worse than what Sony and Microsoft offer. I have an Xbox 360 and an HDTV, I've seen the eyecandy and it's delicious. One thing I did notice was despite the fact that my Gamecube was only running at 480i via an S-Video cable, it still wasn't bad at all. The games that were beautiful before (F-Zero, Crystal Chronicles, and that beast of masochism Ikaruga) are still beautiful and I wasn't even using component (which I look forward to on the Wii). You can tell the difference between 480i 6th generation games and 1080i/p 7th generation games, but it doesn't mean the old games burn your eyes.
Even if the Wii is marginally better than the Gamecube remember how incredible games like Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime looked. Even a mere 50% to 100% increase will be more than enough to make the Wii awesome.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
They're taking one chip design and making it smaller, faster and lower power. Somewhere in the article it mentions that the 90nm version of this CPU takes about 2W at GC speeds. For reference, the DS is rated at 1.6W. You can probably predict where this is going.
And my PC is just a supercharged 386. So what?
Well, not really. The ISA may be the same, but the microarchitecture is completely different. Your PC's CPU looks nothing like a 386, it just happens to speak the same language (and certainly some new instructions, if not entire operating modes like 64-bit, besides).
The point of the article is that the Wii's CPU is really microarchitecturally similar to the Gecko, down to the number of FP pipelines and such, and is basically a 90nm shrink of the old chip with higher clock speeds.
Now personally I find it hard to believe that IBM would go through the trouble of shrinking the chip to 90nm (which isn't as easy as just applying a scaling factor to your old mask) without tweaking the architecture even if there were no major changes planned. I guarantee there were improvements that they either wanted to add to Gecko but didn't have time/resources for, or flaws in the Gecko that they discovered after it was produced that they would like to fix. The shrink to 90nm is the perfect time to get some of those changes in, so I'm betting they did.
Which brings me back to your point, which was: So what? Indeed, so what? So it's the same chip, only at a much higher frequency and probably with a small percent boost in IPC performance besides. How is that bad? It isn't. It just isn't a super brand new highly experimental chip that requires new (or, going back to mainframes with slews of I/O controllers, old) programming methods. So for anyone who was hoping Nintendo would have some incredible hardware specs for them to drool over, dissapointment may ensue. Oh well, there's still a good chance it will be good enough.
Look at the last generation: The Xbox and GC were fighting for best graphics (xbox winning mostly, but GC showing some astounding performances from time to time), and also fighting for 2nd place. 1st place went to the console with the worst graphics, but they were good enough to be part of that generation, and it had the games. The Wii will certainly be representative of this generation of graphics, even if it will be the worst in that regard. Personally I, like anyone who favors a PS2, just hope it has lots of fun games.
The enemies of Democracy are
True of the GBA, but Nintendo DS uses a subset of OpenGL, similar to the "GX" API used by the GameCube.
Call me when I can turn off in-order writes, and they provide barrier instructions so I can control the ordering from software so hyperthreading becomes more than something the P4 engineers thought of as a "compiler problem", without understanding that you don't *ever* run a single compiler-optimized instruction stream to completion without a context switch in a modern OS. You can optimize the non-interrupt code paths in the OS itself, but for apps running *ont top* of the OS, there is no such thing as a "non-interrupt code path"
The _only_ reason this hasn't been done is to maintain binary compatibility, which could be done by making it an MSR controlled option defaulting to "off for DOS & Windows compatiblity". Of course, then people like Linux, BSD, etc. would start taking advantage of it, and, well, kicking some serious butt.
Yeah, I agree with the GP, and I can point to a lot of other "features" of the hardware that make it a "supercharged 386", which, if they were turn-offable, would make the chips have *much* better performance, particularly with a lot of cores.
-- Terry
It's not a single pet feature, it's an example.
/dev/random in Linux, BSD, et. al. is an Abomination Before God, mostly because there is no real hardware generator backing it, and so none of your interrupt processing gets done in bounded time because it "harvests entropy" during interrupt processing and other critical tasks
...let's start with those.
If you want a laundry list, I can provide one, but we can start with this small list of things, which were also true of the i386 as well, making the current CPUs hopped up 386s:
o Too few general purpose registers (this one's glaringly obvious, and compared to dumping another 2M of cache onto a chip, it's relatively easy to fix, but it's only been partially fixed in the 64 bit implementations, and there it was more or less a matter of maintaining binary compatibility with AMD, who beat Intel to the punch)
o No TLB tags to support cache coloring, TLB shootdown of only impacted pages, reduced TLB flush, reduced IPI's between CPUs (yes, 386 supported SMP, if you used external APICs), and, in general, make memory management easier for OS engineers
o Continued reliance on a single FSB for all MESI transactions, instead of a crossbar bus, like in the DEC Alpha, or a Hypertransport, like in the AMD, limits the number of cores you can add before bus contention diminishes the utility of adding another core; let it be said that AMD only got this right, IMO, because they inherited the Alpha chip design team
o Off-board MMU does not provide the ability to off-load memory page zeroing from the main CPU; this leads to higher power consumption in your idle loop, if you zero pages there, and higher latency for clean pages, if you don't. It is *mandatory* to zeero pages before providing them for most uses, as a security issue; if it's just thee eating my electrons, waiting to be asked for pages, it should be *doing* something to earn its keep
o No hardware random number generators;
o Bad support for high resolution timers; in general, you have to jump through incredible hoops to get real HRT support in the hardware (unlike PPC or SPARC hardware), which end up taking a lot more work then necessary, since you have to mux them
o No vector MMU; SSE is very poor compared to a real vector processor; Altivec on PPC, vector on SPARC, and Weitek (from waaaay back when) all do much better on floating point; even if they didn't, non-compliance with IEEE-754 makes much of SSE a non-starter ("I can make it as fast as you want, if it doesn't have to be correct" - Ed Lane)
o No routing interrupts based on power management when routing is done in Intel MP Spec. "Virtual Wire" model; heck, no decent specific routing anyway (load based, and/or using source quench to implement LRP or other techniques)
-- Terry
Gamecube games look great on my 32" Samsung LCD HDTV (1366 x 768, RGB SCART connection). I think a lot of modern LCDs do a good job of displaying SD content.
Here in australia (omg there's ppl outside the US?) i can only think of one person who went out and bought a HDTV LCD beast. Granted its good (was awesome for the world cup) but frankly is certainly not worth the money, i know a few ppl who bought the 360 and they wouldn't even consider a HDTV in the next few years. In terms of games we play the good ol' xbox on the afore mentioned HDTV LCD beast, to be honest i don't really think its worth the hassle when you sit a few meters from the screen anyway, granted you can tell it's not as sharp, but it's in no way ugly. I guess it comes down to benefit vs cost. Personally i see little benefit in spending an extra 1k/2k on a decent sized HDTV just for sharper graphics when we'd then need to get digital tv AND a HD console to get any use out of it. I guess it's each to there own, i think Nintendo are smart in the fact they can sell this awesome console (note: awesome due to games+motion controllers) and charge so much less than microsoft and sony (especially sony!) for it, mostly due to this fact. I've never been favourable to any of those company's, even if i wanted to get a 360/ps3 i still wouldn't buy a HDTV, I'd rather still have my weekends out for the next 3 or 4 months :)
No, it's going to be limited by the controller. The Wii's controller is the most fun.
Or maybe not.
My statement is only slightly less absurd than yours. "Fun" is most certainly not going to be limited by graphics. Is "Super Mario Bros" less fun than "Charlie's Angels" simply because its graphics are very modest compared to the more recent 3D game?
Again, this statement is somewhat strange. Add-on controllers have never been successfull. In the case you mention, the guitar controller costs a fortune and works with only very few games. How many games are there for EyeToy? The Donkey Konga Bongos? The PowerGlove?
Add-on controllers can never compete with an innovative main controller.