See guys, if it wasn't for Thraktor's (quite elaborate and eloquent) response I'd have never seen bg's original paging. Who said something about WUSTs slowing down on the community side? Anyhow, let me try and answer the darn question.
I largely share Thraktor's take on dedicated/primarily raytracing-targeting silicon in the wiiU. We are very close to the next threshold in visualisation where quantitative accumulations will bring to the next qualitative change (see
http://raytracey.blogspot.com,
http://igad.nhtv.nl/~bikker/, IMG's raytracing SDK, et al), but that will most likely not happen during this pending console generation. Or at least I don't expect anything large or paradigm-shifty ..Well, save for the odd ambitious indie dev toying with relatively low-res output devices coupled to relatively powerful console units *wink-wink nudge-nudge*.
Speaking of what viable enhancements nintendo might have got into their amd-grown gpu, a possibility there that has been largely neglected over the past WUST talks is that it could be something *not* ALU-related. We have already discussed the role a gpu-local edram pool could have. But everything so far has been largely inferred from the way Xenos used its edram - i.e. as a very performant fb. The advent of GPGPU has brought to the gpu landscape some very non-graphics tweaks like local storages/caches shared between ALU clusters, and basically all kinds of niceties mainly addressing the *data paths* in the gpu rather than what gpu ALUs constitute (ok, those too, but that's been rather evolutionary).
Surely Thraktor is absolutely correct to say that whatever nintendo might have come up with, amd & nv must have already considered, or even implemented, into their current/future architectures. But let's not forget what nintendo are bargaining for here: they are not ordering some unheard-of tech integrated in an off-the-shelf part, no - they are bargaining for the best bang for transistor. To translate that into simple terms, you can think of nintendo cherry-picking from the amd gardens to a fruit basket that best suites nintendo's fruit salad (aha! and you thought bad metaphors were only cars-related ; ) What does that mean? Not any alien tech, that's for sure. That simply means that:
a. U-GPU will have its own ISA (derived from known amd ISA(s), but still unique), and
b. U-GPU will put its (rumored) fat edram pool to the best possible use, i.e. beyond Xenos' use case.
Will that make U-GPU extraterrestrial, omnipotent, etc? - Nope. Will it make it a very darn impressive gpu for the amount of transistors it has? - Quite likely.
Oh, and btw, did I ever mention GFLOPs do not a gpu constitute?
