Ok but if they are serious about wiiu's multimedia and online capabilities they should have included one in at least one of the models.
Forget that, i am getting my own HDD a 500GB external hdd is like $60. I am not prepared to pay for a proprietry hdd up the nose again. plus i have a few eHDD lying around I am sure I can use on of them.
It's similar. But the Wii was at least clearly better than the PS2 in all aspects. We don't know that about the Wii U CPU.
I would guess that on a 3:1 clock ratio to broadway, the Espresso cores would be around 2.187GHz each which might be the maximum clock ceiling the chip is able to reach and probably consuming around 8 Watts. It is possible however that it is only 2:1 ratio at 1.458Ghz which three of these cores will perform about 10% faster than the Xenon if it ran 5 instructions per cycle. We still don't know if there is indeed one main core with more cache.
xenon 2 instructions @ 3.2Ghz x3 cores = 19200 in order instructions
Espresso 5 instructions (similar to power PC G5) @ 1.458GHz x3 cores = 21870 out of order instructions
even at 1.458Ghz the 3 Espressso cores will beat the Xenon and running at only 4 watts.
The Xenon used a lot of one core for sound and the Wii U has a DSP at 120Mhz which will also help. Isn't there also an arm co cpu? Even at this speed it will perform about 1.5x Xenon.
If however it is clocked at a 3:1 ratio on a 729Mhz bus
Espresso 5 instructions (similar to power PC G5) @ 2.187GHz x3 cores = 32805 out of order instructions
+DSP + the arm co cpu will probably perform about 2.5x the Xenon CPU
For reference
The 476FP core has 32/32 kB L1 cache, dual integer units and a SIMD capable double precision FPU that handles DSP instructions. Emitting 1.6 W at 1.6 GHz on a 45 nm fabrication process.
three of these cores are faster then Xenon.
The GPU is what we would really like to know as well.
If the GPU has 640 alu's and is clocked at 607.5MHz then we are probably looking at over 768GFLOPS in the same vain as a HD7750 which is 819GFLOPS, but performs faster than a 4870 at 1.2TFLOPS. More realistically, the gpu can be clocked at around 486Mhz which would be around 622.1GFLOPS but still perform faster then the 1000GFLOP HD 4850 @500MHz @110w TDP. For reference, the Radeon E6760 is 576GFLOPS @35w TDP also outperforms the HD4850 which is around 5x faster than the Xenos in real world scenarios.
The WiiU also has 32MB Edram which will help with AA especially on 720p with 4xAA looking good. 1080 will also be possible but probably no AA.
The ram being 1024MB as of now alloted for games is over 2x that of the xbox 360 which also used its ram for the OS. The Wii U OS might have 512MB or more currently dedicated to it. This will mean multitasking while playing games is definitely possible.
So we are still basically unknown on some numbers so we don't know but is it possible we are looking at maybe two scenarios with the first one being likely but the second one still possible?
Espresso Tri core clocked at 1.458Ghz or 2.187Ghz (i hope it is the latter)
"Enhanced Broadway" similar to PowerPC 476FP architecture.
3MB L2 Cache
core 0: 512 KB
core 1: 2048 KB
core 2: 512 KB
OoOE
5 instructions per cycle (unknown)
45nm @ 4-8w TDP?
GPU
32MB Edram 4x AA 720p or 1080p no AA
1024 MB Video DDR3 (2GB total) or GDDR5 (1.5GB total)
486Mhz or 607.5MHz (HD4850 performance or HD4870 performance)
640 ALU
Open GL 4.3
The low end will outperform the XBOX 360 probably 2.5x and the high number will be 4.5x
if it was low end I would see $249 with no pack in game but on High End I would see $299 without including the pack in game.