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Nintendo Wii U Teardown Reveals Simple Design

Posted by timothy on from the to-thine-own-hand-be-true dept.

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."

9 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. well doh. keep it cheap and simple. by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Interesting

    that's the nintendo way. which device from them had a complicated board or cutting edge performance?

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    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    1. Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually, I was quite happy that Nintendo held on to cartridges one extra generation. The PlayStation used CDs and had atrocious load times. The GameCube also used proprietary CDs (not sure if it was due to the discs or some other reason) and had vastly superior load times compared to the PS2. That's one thing I've always liked about Nintendo is that they focused on getting load times to be short. Metroid Prime was beautiful in this respect. A vast landscape, and only briefly did it go into loading (when on the elevator) and then it almost wasn't even noticeable as it was almost part of the game. It was easily possibly to play Metroid for more than half an hour without running into an elevator. It only happened when they switch to a completely different landscape.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. by LordLimecat · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I also dont remember any substantial load times for any cartridge-based games. If you want a good comparison, compare the performance of Chrono Trigger on the SNES to the Chrono Trigger / Final Fantasy CD for the Playstation; every time you paused or had a battle on the PS version, you incurred a 30 second load time which made the game unplayable.

      There are a lot of benefits to discs, but there are also a lot of drawbacks-- notably, seek performance sucks compared to cartridge.

  2. Simplicity of design is an important factor by DreamMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Of course, part of the problem is just how you define 'Just ahead of'. Part of the problem in the last cycle with the PS3 particularly, from what I undestand, was the complexity of developing the software for the multi-core Cell processor architecture. Even if the speed of the Wii U overall isn't much better overall, the fact that the architecture is simpler may make it easier for developers to wring better performance out of their games. The fastest system in the world isn't going to matter if it's so hard to develop for that you end up writing poorly performant code.

    We'll have to wait and see how well newly released titles post-launch are able to do with the new hardware.

    1. Re:Simplicity of design is an important factor by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well its a balancing act, make it too hard and many companies won't bother, same thing happened to Sega with the Saturn that was more powerful than the PS1 but didn't look it because it was a royal bitch to write games for. So you want to give yourself enough power that the system will look good 5 years from now (the typical life of a console before the downturn) but you don't want to make it so complex that nobody will put in the work but you.

      And if the rumors are true IBM and AMD are gonna be the winners next gen, because the rumor has all of the consoles using their GPU and at least one (PS4) using their APU, so no matter who wins IBM and AMD will be cashing the checks. I have to wonder if this isn't the reason that the Steambox is supposedly gonna have an Intel CPU/APU and an Nvidia GPU, I wouldn't be surprised if looking at being shut out of the next gen consoles that Nvidia offered a sweetheart deal to Valve to go green for their console.

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      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    2. Re:Simplicity of design is an important factor by robthebloke · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A trade off? Such as the a compiler that is so bug ridden, it failed to accept things such as "#define SIZE 10"? (which has since been fixed). Or, having three different threading API's, none of which worked together, and none of which actually worked properly? (requiring that we wrote our own). Or maybe, the cost of a mis-predicted branch causing a 8000 cycle CPU stall, made worse by the fact there was no branch predictor, which meant every line of existing code had to be re-written without branches? Or the lack of any decent development tools for years after launch? That wasn't a trade off, it was a disaster!

  3. Re:Yes and no... by gman003 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Did you see some source I haven't? I've been scouring the net regularly for detailed specs on the Wii U, and as of right now, I can't find any reputable specs for the CPU or GPU.

    We do know that it's a POWER-based CPU, almost definitely POWER7, but it could be single-core for all we know (although the rumors seem to have settled on quad-core, with some level of SMT, with a clock speed in the 3GHz range). And the GPU seems to be a complete mystery, other than it being made by AMD.

    I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm more curious as to where you got that info so I can read it myself.

    I'll also note that, if the rumors are right, it basically confirms my "half-generation" hypothesis, that Nintendo is deliberately designing their consoles to be half a generation behind Microsoft/Sony, so they get lower hardware costs, better thermal bounds, and can just follow the architecture of the "winning" console instead of risking a less established architecture, but are still "close enough" to the current-gen to be competitive for the hardcore gamers, and are enough of an improvement on the last generation to entice their own customers to upgrade.

  4. Re:PS3 by LordLimecat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    Forgive me if Im skeptical of an AC claiming that a company who has been creating consoles for 30+ years managed to make RAM slower than disk access. That would be basically impossible to pull off even if you were specifically trying to do so; theres about 3 orders of magnitude difference between the speed of the two.

    Cache vs RAM is also a bit hard to believe, but at least there youre only talking one or two orders of magnitude.

  5. Re:PS3 by cpct0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OP AC:
    I used to code for Wii. Haven't coded for WiiU. So I cannot tell, only extrapolating from what you are saying here.

    However, what you are giving as info is mostly the same than Wii used to have. I expected they kept full compatibility between the WiiU and the Wii, so they could emulate the system. That probably explains the chips.

    Your PS (Paired Single) experience is mostly what I would expect from a newbie assembly programmer. Sorry. Yes, it's very hard to code PSes but once you get the hang of it, it's very efficient.

    As far as your memory experience, I would expect the WiiU to use the equivalent from the Wii, meaning they have a very fast internal memory, and a cacheless external memory. It's powerful if you understand how to work its magic, and you need to know how to use caches or other accumulators to transfer data.

    Not saying it isn't a pain. It is. Especially if you want to code as a general purpose guy (big company), with compatibility on multiple platforms. Most multiplatform have one kind of memory, so it expects fast and efficient RAM for its whole game. However, if you code solely for the WiiU, and have a background in Wii or in GameCube, you'll feel right at home I'm sure. Read your comments, and it all rang bells.

    LordLimecat:
    It would make sense if the WiiU uses the same system than the Wii. Wii uses 2 kind of RAM, first one is very quick for random access, but you have very little of it. Second one is very quick for sequential write access, but horribly slow for random read access. Depending on tests, you can get magnitude of slowness in that kind of RAM on Wii. Now, I don't have experience in WiiU (and even if I did, I would keep this confidential, to be honest), but I do feel in a familiar place. :)

    -full disclosure- Work for EA, all info here was double-checked for availability in the likes of Wikipedia and Google. Opinions are mine.