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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."
that's the nintendo way. which device from them had a complicated board or cutting edge performance?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
The WiiU is able to handle many multiplatform games in 1080p that the existing consoles can barely run at 720p. That alone suggests it's at least 2x more powerful or so. Also consider that developers have had far longer to optimize to the other consoles, and it could be even more capable. And what's more, it has 4x the 360's RAM.
It may not be as different from the PS3 / 360 as they were from the PS2 / Xbox, but saying it's barely an improvement over the current crop is clearly bullshit.
Somewhat misleading. While the CPU power of the Wii U most certainly lies in the realm of what you see in the 360 (rumor is it's basically a 3 core, overclocked Wii processor), the video power is a decent step up. We're talking about a semi modern GPU that supports all sorts of bells and whistles none of the last gen consoles did. The Wii U will most certainly be left in the dust by the PS4/720, but the beautiful thing about it is that it should probably be able to play next gen multi-platform ports in 720p. Which will be fine for most people, as half the HDTVs out there are only 720p to begin with (and look just fine).
Depends how you measure it. Graphics are better but the 3-core PowerPC processor is weaker.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Well, I should fucking hope so. The XBOX 360 is seven years old.
It allowed for Waverace to run a circular wave model for the entire course at once. Gauging consoles against the PC model that Xbox introduced is fallacy.
I agree. I know it's just being released, but I'm eager to hear if the communications with the controller are encrypted or not, and whether it uses 'off the shelf' parts/protocols that would be easy to duplicate. Just as lots of homebrew coolness has come out of the Wii controller, it'd be interesting to find out if something similar can be done for the Wii U controller. Not just for being a portable media player, but other cool things. Maybe even implement a PC display driver so people could use it as a cheap extra screen for their home computer.
Just as lots of homebrew coolness has come out of the Wii controller, it'd be interesting to find out if something similar can be done for the Wii U controller.
The Wii Remote was special because it was a relatively cheap accelerometer wand. But I just don't really see the unique selling point of the Wii U GamePad over an Android tablet, especially once this Archos product that combines an Android tablet with traditional gaming buttons comes out.
Maybe even implement a PC display driver so people could use it as a cheap extra screen for their home computer.
If you just want to show PC graphics on a tablet, I seem to remember VNC clients being available for Android tablets.
The more grunt the system has, the harder it becomes to make effective use of that grunt.
It's ridiculously easy to make effective use of that grunt. It's trivial to bring a modern octocore 4 GPU SLI machine to its knees. The PS3 was hard to program for because it was a weird and non-standard hardware model that had poor development tools.
When you get right down to it: why does the CPU and GPU grunt under the hood matter? Only so they can power the graphics, physics, and AI effects of the games. Come up with a game that's fun to play, and people won't care how powerful the console is, as long as that game will run. We're seeing this play out in a major way on the iPhone and iPad.
Because graphics, physics and AI all make the game fun. How many game reviews have you heard complain about "stupid enemies".
The reason we had "monsters in corridors" games for so long was because that's all that we could render well. If you have more "grunt" at your disposal you can start creating more immersive and expansive worlds. Imagine Red Dead Redemption if you couldn't leave the canyon because nothing could render the rest of the world? Hardware enables new game-play capabilities.
There are certainly more gaming opportunities with 2D and other lightweight rendering technology but I remember being completely and utterly blown away by Zelda Ocarina of Time due to the leap into a 3D world with characters I could *see* and interact with.
As to the rise of tablets and cell phones... the GPUs and CPUs in a latest generation cell phone or tablet is nearly on par with an Xbox 360 if you are willing to sacrifice resolution. The latest PowerVR chipsets even support DX11.
It could very well be a POWER7-based design. Key word "based". Nobody (well, nobody with two brain cells) is saying they put a full POWER7 chip in the console.
But here's what they could have done:
Take a stock POWER7 chip. Strip it down to 4 cores - or maybe down to triple- or dual-core. Strip out some of the more redundant execution units (decimal float? four floating-point units?). Cut down on the massive cache. Cut out all the multi-socket stuff, the ECC support, trim down the memory controller to what a console needs, and lower the clock speed to keep the heat down.
That probably just cut your performance to under a quarter of a full POWER7, but it probably cut your costs down even more, to something that could actually fit in a console.
I'm sure it's on bushing's to-do list. (Using the new colloquial definition of root) He got the Wii rooted in like six months. Nowadays you can easily get a "Homebrew Channel" on your homescreen, which acts like an App Store for awesome stuff like emulators, gameshark-esque hacking devices, media players, even a virtualmachine host.
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G
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.
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.
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.
It uses Wifi 802.11n for both controls and video to the new pad. Some cool software hacks, but standard 802.11n for the base.
Bluetooth still for the regular Wiimote.
>Work for EA
I'm so sorry.
(Note: this is speculation, I never asked Nintendo about these, nor did I had any access to whatever internal documentation on RAM for the Wii - much less for WiiU)
Like I said, the 64M GDDR RAM of Wii is very quick, but optimized to be read and written in big chunks. It's not meant for per-byte random access.
I don't have the specifics at hand, but RAM is read in big chunks (32 bytes, 256 bytes, I really don't remember), and kept in cache from there. As long as you stay in that cache, it's all right.
Also, that RAM is used for GPU, DMA, and everything else external to the CPU. So its bandwidth is split between everything in the console. That means crappy bandwidth, split at controller side. That's GDDR RAM, tied down to the graphical chip, and that one has priority. That's why they added up so many features to transfer data back and forth from RAM. That way, you can do bulk transfers in background while the CPU is happily churning something else. Would it be that fast, there wouldn't be such tools.
On a side note, I'd take OP AC with a grain of salt. However, HDDs do transfer quickly when accessing data sequentially. So I don't say it's impossible to have the same CPU-side bandwidth. You are totally right about latency, that said; HDDs are very slow to seek.
Yet again, reminder this is for Wii, I have no idea how the WiiU works.