Trevelyan9999
Banned
lol, this video is actually titled "Wii U GPU" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB3a9G7F8nc
AMD started developing embedded GPU's in 2008.....hmmmm
AMD started developing embedded GPU's in 2008.....hmmmm
Rumor: Wii U final specs
- Thread starter EatChildren
- Start date
bgassassin
Member
It's funny how it blew up like that. I agree that it still makes a good comparison of what can be achieved TDP-wise.
You should start that Wii U used a 8xxx variant and see what happens.
Haha. I've harped too much on the R700 for that to work.
So what about this PR,
http://www.ghs.com/news/20120327_ESC_Nintendo_WiiU.html
Combined with this PR,
http://www.altsoftware.com/press-ne...gl-graphics-driver-architecture-embedded-syst
Added with the fact that the e6760 is supposedly the only AMD GPU to use Green Hills Software. 1+1=2?
Do you still see this as "foolishness" when we have pretty specific proof in regards to the two press releases that say otherwise?
And doesn't a modified e6760 still qualify as "CUSTOM"? In my book, yes.
Until signs point elsewhere, they seem to point right at the e6760.
Trevelyan9999
Banned
I'm forced to agree with you on that.....anything that is changed from it's original form factor can be considered "custom". I agree that those press releases are very intriguing but who is to say that Nintendo didn't just make the GPU similar but not necessarily based on the e6760?
That is a good point. Even if they did just make it similar to the e6760, I think it still points us in the right direction in regards to what the Wii U will be able to do at the end of the day.
bgassassin
Member
The thing for me is that I've been wrestling with Matt's post.
If I understand him correctly then something in his description seems off. Again if I understand correctly, going with an RV730 as an example, it has 64 register files. The E6760 I believe has has 96. Even with an RV730 that gap to me is too small for there to be "significantly more" than the R700, but "seemingly less" than the E6760. So again if I understand him correctly I think a simple yes or no answer of there being more than 96 registers or 64 registers would help me in getting an idea of what we might be looking at.
Considering all that you linked was discussed awhile back here, yes it's still foolishness. I posted the link where the E6760 talk started and the person you are responding to was the first person on GAF to bring it up.
I understand that he brought it up first, long, long ago. I read the posts. But, I don't see how the passing of time now makes this information any less valid? Was something else discussed that totally dethroned the idea of a modified e6760?
...
Obviously bgassassin is just trying to throw you all off now that you've discovered who his source was all this time.Why y'all letting AMD tech support troll you like that?
bgassassin
Member
Yes. A decent portion of the GPU features come from the R700 line. That never changed.
Hmm, fair enough. Be how do registers translate to FLOPS?
specialguy
Banned
Acually you harped on the e6760, till you realized it was wrong.
<<<original RV730 guy
<<<<Always right about the Wii U
#justsayin
specialguy
Banned
they dont.
I presume the change would be to allow the R700 to do more GPGPU-ish stuff.
Why on earth they didnt just stick a damn cape verde in is beyond me. Oh well, 45 watts and all that.
bgassassin
Member
Are we going to continue this from B3D?
Because apparently you still don't read. See the links I just posted.
And secondly you've shown to be wrong about Wii U-related things so don't make that asinine claim.
I used the RV730 to make a point. Or is that too hard for you to comprehend?
neoneogaffer
Neo Member
If I understand correctly ALT Software's first supported GPU will be AMD Radeon E6760, not that E6760 will be first supported GPU from Green Hills. From what I understand, Nintendo is using Green Hills as the IDE. I'm not sure if Nintendo is also using the Green Hills compiler, though. I've used Multi and Green Hills compiler before, and you don't need to have Green Hills RTOS running on the board; we didn't. I'm not even sure whether Green Hills cares what GPU you're running, although I hope Nintendo chose them because it would provide integrated debugging for CPU and GPU code.
bgassassin
Member
It could give me an idea of how many ALUs are in the GPU.
specialguy
Banned
Lol I knew that'd get you going. So sensitive.
I will say I called rv730 from DAY ONE (which was fairly easy if you use logic (Nintendo goes low on hardware) plus the original 01.net rumors, so it's no great credit to me).
We dont know if I'm right yet, but pretty sure I will be. Even if it's an RV730 with more registers that's an RV730.
I was somewhat right on my 349 price guess recently, which was also an original way back guess.
Even though it was 299/349, the bottom line is the unit is pretty expensive which was the gist of my thinking.
I will say I called rv730 from DAY ONE (which was fairly easy if you use logic (Nintendo goes low on hardware) plus the original 01.net rumors, so it's no great credit to me).
We dont know if I'm right yet, but pretty sure I will be. Even if it's an RV730 with more registers that's an RV730.
I was somewhat right on my 349 price guess recently, which was also an original way back guess.
Even though it was 299/349, the bottom line is the unit is pretty expensive which was the gist of my thinking.
bgassassin
Member
I'm not sensitive at all. You can interpret that how ever you want though.
Let's also remember that you were right that Wii U won't have 2GB of mem... oh wait you weren't right on that.
Plus let's not talk about being sensitive after the PM you sent me.
lwilliams3
Member
Why are you so caught up on this "RV730" thing? Several insiders have hinted that Wii U GPU was modified from its R700 base, so at the end I'm unsure if you can label it as any of the original GPU codenames. The final GPU may have a custom number of SPUs that is neither 320 or 640.
bgassassin
Member
Further reading leads me to believe my first interpretation is not correct.
R700 series has 128 GPRs I think.
bgassassin
Member
Haha. That's what I was correcting myself on though I read it somewhere else. I haven't seen anything (yet) for the Turks line of GPUs. I'll be continuing the search later unless someone finds it before then.
No. The 32 MB is DRAM. The system should have a ton of memory set aside for the OS.[/QUOTE]
Why are you talking to yourself?
& does anyone know how the GPRs compare to the SPEs on the Cell processor?
lightchris
Member
I don't unterstand the question. GPRs are registers, SPEs are processors (with memory controller). How should they compare?
ColdBlooder
Banned
This. This is what I was trying to say earlier. Not that it would be a e6760 in there, or even based off of. But just that this is the ballpark in terms of bang for buck (or flops/per watt)
ColdBlooder
Banned
Ofcourse its just the chip. They wouldn´tneed the complete BGA package since Wii U has unified RAM pool.
I thought the amount of GPRs would give us a clue of how good the GPU will be at Computing so I was just fishing for clues.
I think it could end up similar for sure. Nothing to do with emails, previous posts etc. Just objectively and through putting pieces together myself, it still comes up as something in the ballpark.
That gpu (not the whole mcm, so that's no greedy gddr5 included), with a lower clock, fewer GPRs and on a smaller die would be ridiculously low power for what its able to do. You could get it to, like 20w.
I'm not sure you can say the same for r700 can you? I also thought r700s were in the early dev kits? Is Matt confirming they're in the mass production ones?
The way I understand it, is that AMD would probably rather incorporate the design of a gpu they need to manufacture for 5 years with one they were already planning on manufacturing for 5 years, instead of keeping older lines alive. It's cheaper for everyone in the long run.
SpoonyBard
Banned
More registers is usually better, but also more costly. Usually adding more registers reguires you to reduce complexity elsewhere in order to keep the same die size. So it all depends on many things...
So ok, so a custom E6760 would satisfy power constraints (form factor also?). Presumably also shrink size, Eyefinity tech and RAM. It should perform as well as an HD 4850, which is quite a notch better than both RSX and Xenos. All of this is correct, yeah?
I could be a very solid contender if its price was known also.
But I still don't understand this talk about RV730/700/740 in this context. What do we talk about these codenames and why do they seem to be a source of conflict with the assumption that the Wii U GPU is based on the E6760. Thanks much in advance GAF.
I could be a very solid contender if its price was known also.
But I still don't understand this talk about RV730/700/740 in this context. What do we talk about these codenames and why do they seem to be a source of conflict with the assumption that the Wii U GPU is based on the E6760. Thanks much in advance GAF.
The Radeon r7xx line was the codename for HD4xxx series gpus, manufactured in 2008. e6760 is a southern islands (HD7xxx)* based gpu, manufactured from 2011.
*Edit; of course the above is incorrect. e6760 is based on HD6000 (Northern Islands)!
ColdBlooder
Banned
The r700 in the early kits was used to give the devs something close to the target performance. And E6760 also fits TAHT bill aswe..
Its ridiculus how mich that chip "suits" the Wii U if you think about it.
And yeah the e6760 would propably be cheaper in the long run IMO
Whats also aersome about the E6760 is it has nearly all 2012 bells and whistles. Its a 2011 tech gpu. Thats very important for downports!
So much for outdated tech!
Just a question: do you regularly get beaten up in real life?
bgassassin has ALWAYS said the e6760 was an example of how efficient and low power they COULD make the GPU, and took it as a point of reference, never as "this chip will be in WiiU".
32MB OS, amirite? Yup, you've always been right about WiiU... ROFL.
Did you just admit to trolling?
For the moment it seems safe to assume about "2x" the 360. Depending on actual specs (which we don't have a lot of) it could be a bit more or a bit less than that (most likely between 1.5x & 3x). That would be over 20 times more powerful than Wii i guess.
ColdBlooder
Banned
No, the r6XXX line is still VLIW based (Northern islands)
But thats not important. Important is the feature set. Because this GPU is 2 generations(!) ahead of what we thought is in the Wii U
ColdBlooder
Banned
MY guess: ~3x 360 maybe more. But at this point, EVERYONE is just guessing. Such things will get more clear troughout the next generation.
Hardware is not really judgeable trough numbers alone... Wich we have no official word on from Nintendo...
Edited my post to reflect this....
And we don't know it is 2 gens ahead of what we thought - its just one theory.
You could take an r7xx, add GPRs, add other features to bring it above dx10.1 & SM 4.0, tweak it some more to be low powered enough to fit a suitable TDP etc etc and you'd be able to get similar results. I just don't understand why that would be the preferred option for Nintendo or AMD at a time when AMD were shutting down r7xx and gearing up for these new, lower powered chips...Remember this thing has to be potentially mass produced for the next 5 years.
Everything points to shared iirc
Not sure if you guys are joking, but just in case not that quote was originally from specialguy a few posts above the one that sends you back to.
The problem with this kind of thinking, is that we don't really know which info we got about old dev kits, who gave us second hand information and what information we have now.
That is why I strongly think we should try to figure out what we know, before we declare it as fact. For instance unified memory doesn't really make complete sense, given that the system and game resources are completely separate right now, who is saying that they aren't simply 2 different pools.
About the e6760: If the original dev kits used HD4850s to approximate the performance of a chip, the e6760's performance does fall perfectly in line with this, not saying it is but it also really doesn't matter if it's not; we are getting a grasp on the performance and this fits the power draw and the targeted performance.
It works with all of our rumors too. Also while the e6760 is part of the "turks" family, it's using "evergreen" shaders, which is the HD5000 series. Embedded graphic cards also are perfect for a low powered console and looking at the software side of it, e6760 fits the bill quite a bit. You could call it the full featured GPU lacking teeth (even if it's performance can match a 2008's 1TFLOPs card, that doesn't mean it does it with raw power)
I want to point out also that the 40nm was likely shrunk, what exactly does 1GB of GDDR5 cost? 5watts? I am not sure but lets use that number so we can move forward with our speculations, 30watts is now what the e6760 runs at, shrunken to 32nm or 28nm (there was the rumor about problems in manufacturing the gpu, that certainly isn't something done at 40nm) at 28nm it's easy to push the GPU to 20watts or less, but we will be realistic and say 25watts for the 32nm. 8-10watts for the CPU and another 10watts for the system would reach that 45watts fairly easily.
My guess is that Wii U is 3 custom 476fp's built on PPC7 tech (the soi and embedded ram) sharing the 32mb edram with the custom embedded GPU7 which is 5000 series shaders or 6000 series shaders combined with 1GB ram and some fixed functions to emulate Flipper more accurately. I do think we are talking about something beyond the 4000 series as a base, in fact I haven't seen one single semi reliable rumor that confirms that Wii U is still using something based off of R770 (which is what the HD4850 is) instead all I see is a lot of people who don't want to get hyped, so they down play whatever the specs could be and hold onto rumors like the OP's, which comes from at best second hand info from someone who knows very little about what that info means.
Arkam has been great trying to give us this info, even when he was attacked but just because he was told something about the system a year ago, doesn't mean that is what the system is now.
I really hope this got through to some of you, I understand that you have a lot of insider info being thrown around at you, but I think you are mixing info from old sources, new sources and unreliable sources in such a way, that it becomes useless information.
Osiris
I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
GDDR5 makes no sense, there would be no point of having 32MB of EDRAM if the main pool was GDDR5 as the speed of the EDRAM would be wasted, due to the very high bandwidth of GDDR5.
More likely to be a single pool of GDDR3, on a UMA. This would fit the "lower cost" requirement of the design and make the speed of the EDRAM worthwhile, asd there would be no need to make the design costlier by engineering a system with 2 seperate busses for the two different pools of RAM.
A single GDDR3 pool would also allow them the flexibility to increase the amount of memory available to devs at a later date, whereas if they went with seperate pools they would probably find themselves hardlocked to 1GB Games / 1GB OS.
More likely to be a single pool of GDDR3, on a UMA. This would fit the "lower cost" requirement of the design and make the speed of the EDRAM worthwhile, asd there would be no need to make the design costlier by engineering a system with 2 seperate busses for the two different pools of RAM.
A single GDDR3 pool would also allow them the flexibility to increase the amount of memory available to devs at a later date, whereas if they went with seperate pools they would probably find themselves hardlocked to 1GB Games / 1GB OS.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
128 GPRs is what an ALU clause in a single R700 thread can address (a clause is a schedulable sub-routine, put loosely). An R700 SIMD engine runs 64 threads. A GPU has multiple SIMD engines. You could say that a R700 has 'a tad more' than 128 GPRs.
Here's something educational: http://gpgpu.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/E1-OpenCL-Architecture.pdf (pay particular attention to pg. 10)
