So the WiiU's cpu is a 1.25 Ghz tri-core PowerPC 750...

[-Slacker-]

https://twitter.com/marcan42


Nintendo ... seriously dude? A PowerPC 750?

Christ ... does anyone know the clock-for-clock difference between an IBM PowerPC 750 core and a Power5/5+ core?

 

[A5]

Not sure why you're asking for a comparison to POWER5 - it runs a completely different version of the PPC ISA from PPC 750. Beyond that, it's really hard to compare them on an IPC basis without a really detailed simulator or examples of both types of hardware to run some benchmark code on.

 

[A5]

It basically sounds like this core is 2x the clockspeed of the Wii, with 3 cores instead of one. Depending on the GPU, I'd expect its top performance is a bit higher than the 360, but you'll probably only see it maximized by Nintendo-made games.

 

[NTMBK]

https://twitter.com/marcan42


Nintendo ... seriously dude? A PowerPC 750?

Christ ... does anyone know the clock-for-clock difference between an IBM PowerPC 750 core and a Power5/5+ core?

It's a further evolution of the Gekko core which was originally in the Gamecube (a single core at 486MHz).

 

[-Slacker-]

It's a further evolution of the Gekko core which was originally in the Gamecube (a single core at 486MHz).

Yeah I know. That's why I'm foaming at the mouth :\

Edit:

I don't know how it compares at the actual clock speeds, but at the same clock the 750 wins hands down except on pure SIMD.

Hmm..

 

[inf64]

Yeah I know. That's why I'm foaming at the mouth :\

Edit:



Hmm..

I doubt it has less CPU power than 360. The problem,as of now, is that all games for WiiU are not optimized for it properly. Nintendo needs some blockbuster titles and they need to sell a lot of units in order for devs to optimize properly for their machine.

 

[Hubb1e]

The Wii U would have been pretty awesome in 2006.

 

[blckgrffn]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_7xx

It could have some interesting/sweet custom logic in there. According to the never-wrong wikipedia, it didn't have SMP support. Well, it clearly must now. It is possible that they beefed up the FPU as well.

"No hardware threads. One per core. No new SIMD, just paired singles. But it's a saner core than the P4esque stuff in 360/PS3."

hmm...

It would be more interesting to compare this to a current ARM CPU, IMHO.

I thought the Tegra 3 in my Oooohya was going to be super weak, but maybe it isn't so bad as I thought.

 

[inf64]

As that guy said on his twitter account,Espresso CPU(WiiU) is out of order,short pipeline design with high(er) IPC but weaker SIMD performance. Broadway CPU in xbox360 is in order high clocking design with SMT(vs 3-core low clocked out of order machine in WiiU).

 

[Cerb]

https://twitter.com/marcan42


Nintendo ... seriously dude? A PowerPC 750?

Christ ... does anyone know the clock-for-clock difference between an IBM PowerPC 750 core and a Power5/5+ core?

Could Nintendo afford a Power5? A new PPC core would probably be faster, but break compatibility. At some point, though, it seems like swapping between old and new (GC/Wii/Wii-U modes, and new-console mode with a spiffy shiny new CPU core), or having AMP (they probably don't want to give devs that hassle), would be the way to go, v. speeding up the old CPU(s).

OTOH, they might have gotten a really sweet license for the old PPC CPU, making it much cheaper to keep going with it. I'm not sure that kind of info has ever been released.

 

[A5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_7xx

It could have some interesting/sweet custom logic in there. According to the never-wrong wikipedia, it didn't have SMP support. Well, it clearly must now. It is possible that they beefed up the FPU as well.

"No hardware threads. One per core. No new SIMD, just paired singles. But it's a saner core than the P4esque stuff in 360/PS3."

hmm...

It would be more interesting to compare this to a current ARM CPU, IMHO.

I thought the Tegra 3 in my Oooohya was going to be super weak, but maybe it isn't so bad as I thought.

Ha. The Tegra 3 at 1080p will look terrible - despite Nvidia's marketing, it can't put out 360/PS3 quality at HD resolutions.

 

[-Slacker-]

I doubt it has less CPU power than 360. The problem,as of now, is that all games for WiiU are not optimized for it properly. Nintendo needs some blockbuster titles and they need to sell a lot of units in order for devs to optimize properly for their machine.

I'd be very appreciative if you expanded on that though, even if you don't dumb it down for a computer science illiterate like me

 

[NTMBK]

I'd be very appreciative if you expanded on that though, even if you don't dumb it down for a computer science illiterate like me

The PowerPC cores in the 360 do not have out-of-order execution. This means they can't change the order of instructions to execute them more efficiently, limiting the theoretical performance. It's more like an Intel Atom (in-order with Hyperthreading). On the other hand, the WiiU chip is more like an AMD Bobcat- lower clock speed, half the number of threads, but better real-world performance, largely due to OOOE.

 

[firewolfsm]

I really don't see why they couldn't just put a Trinity processor in there and call it quits. Their GPU is already quite similar.

 

[NTMBK]

I really don't see why they couldn't just put a Trinity processor in there and call it quits. Their GPU is already quite similar.

Using an x86 chip breaks backwards compatibility with the Wii.

 

[moonbogg]

So don't buy it. I know I won't. Its nintendo. They are not a graphics oriented, high tech gaming company. Their games are just fun for kids and family etc.

 

[ChronoReverse]

As mentioned already, if this is a triple core 750 at 1.25GHz, that's actually pretty beefy. More than I had anticipated with all the acclaims of "inadequate CPU power" going around. Gaming is integer driven with lots of decisions isn't it? An out of order design with stronger integer than FP seems to be a wise design.

 

[SPBHM]

I really don't see why they couldn't just put a Trinity processor in there and call it quits. Their GPU is already quite similar.

Die size of the Wii U 3 core CPU is 32.76mm2

that's smaller than a dual core Atom I think,

 

[SlowSpyder]

So don't buy it. I know I won't. Its nintendo. They are not a graphics oriented, high tech gaming company. Their games are just fun for kids and family etc.

I agree, if you're playing games just for how much adult content there is and the graphics, the next Xbox or Playstation will be more for you... or better yet, stick to PC gaming. But, for the record, I'll take something somewhat original even with marginal graphics that's actually fun to play over yet another run of the mill first person shooter or the like. And Nintendo is fairly good at that.

 

[zephyrprime]

Die size of the Wii U 3 core CPU is 32.76mm2

that's smaller than a dual core Atom I think,

Even a a tegra3 is 80mm2 (40nm process). The wii u is using a 45nm process. The tegra2 was 49mm.

 

[frozentundra123456]

So don't buy it. I know I won't. Its nintendo. They are not a graphics oriented, high tech gaming company. Their games are just fun for kids and family etc.

What's wrong with fun for kids and family? Not everyone is a hard core PC gamer.

The problem I see is that they hit the kids/family/casual party game market with the original Wii at a lower price than their competitors. I am not sure they can be successful with that strategy again at a higher price point. But you have to admit, the original Wii was a big success for several years despite being technically far inferior to the other consoles.

 

[Hubb1e]

Even a a tegra3 is 80mm2 (40nm process). The wii u is using a 45nm process. The tegra2 was 49mm.

That tegra 3 die size includes 5 cores, a GPU, and all the extra fixed function hardware for a mobile chip. The Wii die is just the CPU, memory controller, and probably the I/O stuff. So you can't really compare the CPU size by the die size itself. The Wii U CPU is probably quite a bit more powerful than Tegra 3's 4 A9 cores.

 

[Acanthus]

I will buy one the day a new mario kart game comes out.

I'm 30.

 

[xx0xx]

No more Nintendo for me. They lost me after the N64.

 

[Exophase]

That tegra 3 die size includes 5 cores, a GPU, and all the extra fixed function hardware for a mobile chip. The Wii die is just the CPU, memory controller, and probably the I/O stuff. So you can't really compare the CPU size by the die size itself. The Wii U CPU is probably quite a bit more powerful than Tegra 3's 4 A9 cores.

Broadway is OoO, but only minimally so. It's a mostly two-wide design (plus branch folding) with two ALUs and one load/store unit, and has a roughly 6 instruction execution window for reordering. I say roughly because while it has a 6-deep commit queue there's just a single reservation station in front of the execution units (or two in front of L/S) and 6 GPR/FPR rename registers.

I'd say it's actually a pretty similar level of sophistication to Cortex-A9, which is another mostly two-wide, two ALU + one L/S CPU. The pipelines are a shorter but the branch prediction is worse. The FP capability is similar (2x FP32 per cycle or 1x FP32, fmadds) but Broadway lacks the 128-bit integer SIMD NEON has.

So on a core-only basis I'd put the higher clocking quad core Tegra 3 over a triple core 1.24GHz Broadway. But a superior L2 cache and memory subsystem could easily tip things towards Wii U's favor (assuming it really has 3x Broadway to begin with). And while people have been ragging on Wii U's main RAM bandwidth it oustrips Tegra 3's maximum by a pretty wide margin.

On the GPU front it's going to be no competition whatsoever.