Like the hat?
Banned
sorry if it's been asked before, but what exactly is a FLOP and why is it such a big deal? Then I also see people saying that the number of flops makes no difference, so I dunno.
Rumor: Wii U final specs
- Thread starter EatChildren
- Start date
Floating point operation. FLOPs per second is a basic measure of how much number crunching headroom you have on a particular system, or chip.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Eeeh, not necessarily. It's usually the absolute maximum of floating point operations a given hw can do, in the best possible case. Whether that translates to headroom for a given practical task depends entirely on the task. What can be said safely about FLOP ratings, is that if you need 100 FLOPs but the hw is rated at 50 then you're out of juice. The opposite is not true - that if you need 50 and the hw has 100, then you're good - your might not be.
lwilliams3
Member
Yes. Besides lherre and brain-stew, there are several sources that are stated that the Wii U has 32MB or eDRAM, including the VGlink article in which even EatChildren himself confirmed.
It should be noted that Brain-stew quoted, "Final hardware will have enough for either 720p w/ MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass" almost a year ago.
I refuse to make a Vita joke. Refuse.
KungFucius
King Snowflake
I'm not an insider, but I will try to answer some of those questions for you.
I'm hedging my bets that Nintendo have used 3D intergrated circuits for the Wii U. Although its a tech that is not mainstream and still in its infancy, the TDP and performance benifits it offers are significant. What are your thoughts on this? TSMC and IBM have both invested into 3D stacking, And TSMC is rumored to be involved in the Wii U..
I believe more tech-savvy people like Blu, Wsippel, or maybe Bgassassin will give you a better answer than I could on those questions. Hope they will see your post too
There is next to no chance that Nintendo is using TSV ( 3DIC) in the WiiU. As with all new tech only a few tiny players are even offering a low volume TSV process to customers. IBM and TSMC are not using TSV for any of their process flows yet. TSV is a packaging technology and TSMC is just starting to build up their own, in house packaging business. TSMC's customers can choose to have their chips fabbed at TSMC and then have them packaged at 1 of a number of packaging houses. So a customer could have their chips baked at TSMC and eventually have TSV done at a small packaging house, but Nintendo is not going to take that risk. Also the Wii U is huge when it comes to form factor and ability to remove heat. Just compare it to a tablet or high end smartphone.
I work on TSV R&D for a tool vendor and am actually thinking of moving to work on research at one of the companies mentioned above. That is if they can get an offer together in time before I switch to a new group at my current company.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Interesting tidbits. What is your opinion on the outlook for 2.5D stacking? Is it viable for somebody like nintendo?
Refreshment.01
Member
Talladega Knight
Member
what is 3d stacking?
cartman414
Member
I wonder how much are Nintendo saving by going USB 2.0 instead of 3.0.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
I don't think people were expecting 3d stacking. Neither was my question about 3d stacking.
16MB is enough
Trevelyan9999
Banned
They are not really "saving" anything because 3.0 was never a viable option from the get go. Nintendo has been mainly concerned with the Gamepad and the R&D in making the Wii U a next generation Gamecube in terms of performance.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
For 32bit color + 32bit z @1080p - yes. Not for 720p 4xMSAA, though.
Well that and USB3 is still not mature. If you actually have USB3 on your mobo it's like the fucking Wild West of getting devices to work properly on it. USB2 is enough as it'll be above the disc drive's speed anyway.
They probably weighed the cost versus the actual benefits. I think USB 3.0 would be nice, but it's not essential. USB 2.0 is still a lot faster than the read speed of the optical drive. From an actual gaming standpoint USB 3.0 would not have added much except cost.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
What makes you think brain_stew meant 2x MSAA?
Talladega Knight
Member
thanks!
Refreshment.01
Member
No need to be on the defensive blu, i said that and used your post because some people were previously speculating about it.
Of the people posting in these threads you are one of the most versed in the tech subject. So like i said it wasn-t directed towards you.
Maybe not USB 3.0 but Nintendo should have included a faster interface for Hard Drive use, stupid or cheap/whatever oversight on their part.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Ok, I guess my original response should've been 'why are you quoting me?'. Subsequently I noticed people had been speculating about 3d stacking in this thread, but I already expressed my view on the subject elsewhere. Regardless, I'm really curious about the viability of 2.5d for a console maker (in this case - nintendo), as that EETimes article truly put 2.5d into a low-hanging-fruit perspective.
I don't believe that was ever said in that movie.
lwilliams3
Member
Brain-stew's quote didn't specify which level of MSAA it was, but the point was that last year he was paraphrasing what the vgleak document stated: "32MB high-bandwidth eDRAM, supports 720p 4x MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass."
shinra-bansho
Member
I see it as a sigmoid function.
bgassassin
Member
Sounds to me like that was exactly the point. I'm not an insider either and have learned things. What you're saying about him applies to me as well.
Zoramon089
Banned
Why? For what reason? Like was said early USB 2.0 is already faster than the disc drives used in consoles so...
USB2 storage is going to be waaaay more available than external eSATA storage.
Smurfman256
Member
on the subject of the CPU, has anyone else besides me thought of the possibility that Nintendo is using a modified PowerPC A2? It's 45nm, rather powerful while energy-efficient (a tri-core, 2.4GHz model runs at 57.6 GFLOPS and consumes 15.5 watts of power), readily available, has Out of Order operations and *gasp* an L2 eDRAM cache.
bgassassin
Member
It's still an in-order CPU.
JordanN
Banned
It's actually in order.
"Unlike BGP PowerPC 450 core, the A2 core is an in-order;"
Fourth Storm
Member
15.5 watts is too much for the Wii U CPU! It's either a modded 470 series or a straight up Broadway core (the horror). Oh, it's true. It seems likely that the L2 controller or some modification of it has been brought over though, so you are on the money with that.
Smurfman256
Member
ah, you are correct. my mistake. still, has it not been considered? Low power, high performance. And plus there is a 99.999999999999999996% chance that Nintendo is modifying the thing to have other features to make it 100% compatible with Broadway...unless they are putting a Wii SoC onto the MoBo (which is unlikely as it would make the machine more expensive. A certain other company did that *cough cough Sony cough cough* and they eventualy removed it entirely to cut down on production costs.)
JordanN
Banned
The latter is impossible as the Wii is not a multi-core nor is it "...IBM's most advanced technology".
Edit: Going by your posting habits, I should of known better than to reply. @_@
Smurfman256
Member
...15.5 watts too much power? Trolling, much? What does the Xenon SoC consume for power anyways?
bgassassin
Member
It's ok. We talked about it awhile back. I do believe Wii U's CPU shares the characteristic of eDRAM for L2 cache.
He's referring to what we know from Iwata. I'm expecting the CPU to be no more than ~6w.
Smurfman256
Member
what we know from Iwata?
EDIT: He said "75 watts under load, 40 watts on average." I am assuming that he talked to devs about how much power they were using on average while testing the games, and used that number. Future games may require more power than that going all the way up to the full 75 watts of power. who knows?
Posted? Optpix imesta 7 for Wii U has been released.
http://www.inside-games.jp/article/2012/09/30/60190.html
http://www.webtech.co.jp/imesta/wiiu/index.html
http://www.inside-games.jp/article/2012/09/30/60190.html
http://www.webtech.co.jp/imesta/wiiu/index.html
Fourth Storm
Member
It's a shame some people would see that as trolling. I am just trying to help set realistic expectations after following the topic closely for the last year and a half! Iwata says the console draws about 40 watts under normal gaming loads. After doing the math, and assuming the gpu will be the majority of that from dev comments, not much is left for the cpu.
You have no way of knowing this, you're just assuming. Is USB 2.0 faster than the 360's drive speed and throughput? Because that's a valid and real life comparison, unless we're expecting the DVD-ROM to have one of the PS3's drawbacks which is a slow drive speed. I'm not too up on current news though, have we had any real info on the drive speed?
Graphics Horse
Member
22.5MB/s. About 2.5x the PS3. It's not DVD it's a Blu Ray variant with 25GB capacity. (or more if it supports dual layer)
Alright cool. In any case raw numbers never tell the whole story when it comes to read/write speeds, a lot of the story is bandwidth and throughput, which the DVD drive will likely have a major edge. Which is why the absence of a attachable HDD option was a dumb, cheap and overall poor design decision that came down to aesthetics and form factor rather than any other limiting factor (from the manufacturing point of view). Throughput will always favor the metal over ports.
I Stalk Alone
Member
Iwata said last week that the wii u optical drive has a 22.5MB/s read speed which is about the same speed as a 5x blu ray drive. So fast enough for next gen games but quiet enough so the drive sounds doesn't annoy you while playing. USB 2.0 HDD in wii u should have write speeds faster as well as having read speeds faster also.
Just about any device connected via usb on 360 is faster than DVD:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-360-storage-update-the-flash-factor-article?page=4
bgassassin
Member
I had been trying to find this post and had been searching for the wrong number. My prediction was closer than I originally thought.
http://neogaf.net/forum/showpost.php?p=39090808&postcount=3437
Graphics Horse
Member
Just about any device connected via usb on 360 is faster than DVD:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-360-storage-update-the-flash-factor-article?page=4
And their solid state USB drives ouperformed the internal HDD. Interesting.
Optical drives are slow as hell, the numbers do actually tell the story (since it matches up with 5x here), and gets worse when you factor in seek times. Optical drives average around 200ms, hard drives are around 10ms, and SSDs are around .1 or less. That's the main reason SSDs feel fast, more so than the insane bandwidth of newer SSDs...and why optical drives feel slow as hell (not that the low bandwidth here will help either).
Seems that the HDD bus speed is limited to USB2 bandwidth if you look at the HDD vs USB2 HDD, but it's the extremely low seeking time/latency of Flash memory that really helps with loading of multiple files.
The NAND flash is easily going to be the best method to run the game. I kind of doubt we will be able to rip our games to USB external HDD and then transfer 2 or 3 to the console's flash storage, would be great to run games right off the flash or at least the 32GB base version. Cheaper and faster than last gen plus we can choose.
Wouldn't that be up to developers to install the game if their games detects an external drive? I doubt Nintendo will block them since they want people to use their own drives.