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Nintendo Wii U Teardown Reveals Simple Design
Vigile writes "Nintendo has never been known to be very aggressive with its gaming console hardware and with today's release (in the U.S.) of the Wii U we are seeing a continuation of that business model. PC Perspective spent several hours last night taking apart a brand new console to reveal a very simplistic board and platform design topped off with the single multi-chip module that holds the IBM PowerPC CPU and the AMD GPU. The system includes 2GB of GDDR3 memory from Samsung and Foxconn/Hon-Hai built wireless controllers for WiFi and streaming video the gamepad. Even though this system is five years newer, many analysts estimate the processing power of Nintendo's Wii U to be just ahead of what you have in the Xbox 360 today."
Disclaimer: IALD (I am a Licensed Developer)
Because of NDA I can't really say much, but i'd take developing for WiiU than for 360 or PS3 any day. The Hardware, APIs are much simpler and familiar. The hardware in WiiU is DX10 level, while 360 and PS3 are DX9 level with some extra stuff hacked on.
Basically that means, besides the more friendly and flexible hardware, implementing most common rendering techniques can be done more efficiently. (OpenGL 3.x features, OpenCL).
So it's not just about "raw performance". In contrast, DX11 level hardware (what will likely power PS4 or xb720), even if likely to be much faster, won't be that different to program for than WiiU.
Posting anonymously, just because.
Speaking as a developer who's worked on the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the WiiU. The CPU on the WiiU has some nice things on it. But its not as powerful as the Xbox360 chip. I think N went to IBM and asked them: 'What's cheap to put on the chip?' and IBM said 'Well we have this sh*t that no-one wants.' and N said 'we'll take it.'. It does have better branch prediction than the PPCs in the PS3 and Xbox360.
The Espresso chip doesn't have any sort of vector processing. It does have paired singles, but that's a pain, a real pain to use. The floating point registers are 64 bit doubles, so when people talk about paired singles I assumed you split the register in two. No the registers are actually 96 bits wide, its actually a double and a single. To load it you have to load in your single, do a merge operation to move that single to the upper 32 bits, and load in your second one. This makes the stacks explode, because to save a floating point register in the callee takes three operations, and 12 bytes no matter what.
While the WiiU has 1 gig of RAM available to the game to use, the RAM is slow. The cache on the chip is also slow. We had tested out memory bandwidth between cache and main memory on the xbox360 and the WiiU. The main memory access on the Xbox360 is about 2x-4x times as fast as accesses the cache on the WiiU. Yes I mean that the external to the chip RAM on the Xbox360 is faster than the cache memory on the WiiU. I don't remember the full results but I think we figured out accessing the hard drive on the Xbox360 was faster than the RAM on the WiiU too.
The optical drive is also slow. I don't know for sure but it feels like the same drive that went into the PS3. And on the PS3 we used the hard drive to cache things to improve load speeds. Without a hard drive on the WiiU we can't do that.
I won't go into the OS, and the programming environment, but let me just say I hate programming for Windows, and I prefer programming on the Xbox360 to the WiiU.
While the GPU in the WiiU is better (probably because ATI doesn't make anything worse these days), they don't have the CPU and RAM to back it up. Who knows maybe things will be better from launch, but I'm glad to leave the WiiU behind.
So you're saying a magazine called "Nintendo Power" may have been slightly biased in favor of Nintendo?
I would hope that the initial DualShock controller would be an impovement on the N64s initial designs, after all it came out 2 years later. If you would like to read at similar stories, please research the six-axis controller and the Playstation Move.
The N64 as a whole wasn't as durable of a system as I would have liked. But meh.