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THQ Clarifies Claims of "Horrible, Slow" Wii U CPU
An anonymous reader writes "THQ has clarified comments made by 4A Games' chief technical officer, Oles Shishkovtsov, about why their upcoming first-person shooter, Metro, won't be available for Nintendo's new Wii U console. Shishkovtsov had told NowGamer, '[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU,' by way of explaining why a Wii U version of Metro wasn't in the works. Now, THQ's Huw Beynon has provided a more thorough (and more diplomatic) explanation: 'It's a very CPU intensive game. I think it's been verified by plenty of other sources, including your own Digital Foundry guys, that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn't as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform. ... We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It's certainly possible, and it's something we thought we'd like to do. The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we're trying to focus on or we probably wouldn't be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we'd want.'"
I have a strong suspicion that Microsoft and Sony's next hardware is only going to be a modest step up from this current generation. Sony's taken about five billion dollars of losses on the PS3, and recently had their bond rating downgraded to junk territory, while Microsoft took substantial losses on the RROD debacle. Simply put, nobody can afford a repeat of the seventh generation of the console wars. Except for Nintendo, which, between the Wii and the DS, pretty much had a license to print money. Third party problems notwithstanding, Nintendo's lower-end hardware approach seems to be the only sustainable one, and I think Microsoft and Sony would have to be asleep at the wheel to fail to recognize that in time for the upcoming eighth generation.
SNES wasn't slower than Genesis. While the clock speeds in MHZ may say one thing, the 65c816 runs most instructions in fewer cycles than the 68000.
IBM's PowerPC are similar, plenty of instructions that offer one cycle completion as the old 65C816 did. Or better, look at the z196 that IBM has developed, its capable of 5 operations per clock cycle as IBM is a fan of one core, multiple sub-processing units.
The Cell processor used in the PS3 is one PPE "core" with 8 SPE's (processing units), one is locked from the factory, one is dedicated to the OS, and 6 are for the game itself. While the newer IBM PowerXCell 8i, at a mere 2.8Ghz, it is capable of 179.2 GFlops (SP). Because it can process 64 single precision floating point math instructions per clock cycle.
Verses the x86 (and many others from that period such as the Z80) which is actually designed as a 3 cycle per operation machine, especially when fetching data, it took 3 clock cycles to access or write the new data. The 68C816 is 1 cycle for a read or write operation.
More then likely its not a issue of the processor in the Wii, and more of a issue of how much time/money investment the Wii market is really worth to them to recompile a dedicated Wii capable binary.
This site claims its a 4-core 3GHz Power7 CPU with x4 hyperthreading, plus AMD GPU. I'm having a hard time figuring out how that's a "horrible, slow" CPU unless they have a lot of code that is optimized for x86.