IBM Announces Wii Chips In Nintendo Hands

simoniker writes "IBM has announced that the 'Broadway' CPUs created for the Nintendo Wii have been shipping from the company's East Fishkill, N.Y., fabrication facility since earlier this year. Nintendo, it would seem, is ramping up for the launch of their next-gen console in a month or two." Joystiq and Kotaku have the news as well. From the article: "Nintendo has also confirmed their reception of IBM's chip: 'The first chips are in our possession,' said Genyo Takeda, Senior Managing Director/General Manager, Integrated Research & Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd. 'Today's milestone marks the final stage of our drive to reach both core and nontraditional gamers with an inviting, inclusive and remarkable gaming experience.'"

Digitizers?

[headkase]

I'm wondering whether or not the wimote will work with my setup. I have a tv card with a built-in mpeg decoder. So when I'm pointing the thing at my lcd monitor the raster information has been lost - no more timing signal at 60hz. Am I confused or does the wimote work in such a setup?

Re:Digitizers?

[MadUndergrad]

You seem to be talking about some sort of lightgun setup. My understanding is that the Wii comes with a sensor that you place near your tv (or monitor) that triangulates the position and orientation of the wii, plus of course the accelerometer and gyroscope in the offhand attachment. So I shouldn't think you would have any problems.

Re:Wii launch date

[uvajed_ekil]

Hmm. This argument is sound and very well-reasoned, but I don't quite buy it. It works if you consider the two consoles and their projected markets to be identical. But with the PS3 being a more capable machine aimed more at hardcore gamers, and the Wii being a machine of lesser abilities hoping to cash in on casual and young gamers, you have to take more into account than release date. Even if SOny moves the PS3 relases date back to 2008, developers will still support it, and people will still buy it.

Nintendo may "win" in the short run, but I would bet money that the PS3 will soon generate more game sales, in terms of units sold and units sold per console. Sure, some of what would be the PS3 market might buy a Wii, but most of them are not afraid to fork over big bills so they'll buy a PS3 when it comes out anyway. If anything, the suggested scenario will only play to SOny's favor for the 2007 holiday season: he PS3 will be THE release of the year since it will be better (not adjusting for the crazy price, obviously), and it will be new. When it comes time to think about another generation of consoles, I bet we'll look back at the PS3 as the most popular of its generation, though it will certainly not be as dominant as was the PS2.

Or, maybe build quality and reliability will bite it in the ass and I'll look like a damn fool. I just can't count the PS3 out because of a late release, since there's still tons of buzz about it and it looks good (though expensive).

DISCLAIMER: I own a PS2 but am not likely to buy any of the newer consoles within the next two years, as I am not a big gamer and favor the PC as a gaming platform. The price for the Xbox 360 and PS3 (projected) are way too high for me. I will NOT shell out $60 for a game, period. (At least not until inflation drives my salary up a bit and I find a game that can do my laundry.)

It's ironic isn't it...

[admactanium]

that twenty years ago people said macintoshes were toy computers and ibm's were serious business machines. now macs use some stonkin intel processors and ibm processors are behind every next generation game console.

Interested in performance.

[cjkeeme]

I'm interested to see the performance from "Broadway" opposed to "Gekko" (Gamecube). The chip is suppose to perform much better and be 20% more power efficient.

Price Points

[dch24]

A little googling turns up the following info:

There's a really good Ars Technica article [arstechnica.com] that breaks down the prices for the xbox360 and ps3.

xbox360: Xenon CPU $106, ATI GPU $141, total mfg cost $525 (the high end model)
ps3: Cell CPU $230, nVidia GPU $70, total mfg cost $800 (remember the debate? [slashdot.org] I think $350 for the BD-ROM is too high.)

Wii: there's no information out there on what components will cost. But the total price tag will be $250, and an educated guess says that only at most $125 of that can be the Broadway CPU and ATI GPU. Maybe Nintendo will sell the Wii as a loss leader, but they've never done that before.

Now, I'm going to use these specs [blogspot.com] which are unreliable, but speculation is all there is right now:

Total System Memory: 88 Mb RAM, 512 Mb Flash
Broadway CPU: 729 MHz
ATI GPU: 243 MHz

So the GPU probably has 32 Mb RAM or less. What this means is that it's equivalent to an ATI Radeon 9700, which fetches $30-$50 on eBay.

That leaves at most $95 for the CPU, and as little as $75. That's not a lot of money for a dual-core CPU. IBM's not going to make much money on Wii sales, and neither is Nintendo. On the other hand, Nintendo will probably make a killing when the economies of scale kick in and the prices come down. I could see the GPU dropping to $10, the CPU dropping to $50, etc.

Since this is just my speculating, I'd expect someone will reply with more info.

Re:Digitizers?

[headkase]

My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80. I didn't have any storage mediums (not even tape) so I had to write something for it to do each time I turned it on. Sometimes I would press the reset button really fast to occasionaly cause a bad initialization. I really do remember the days of going uphill both ways to the computer shop. When I upgraded to a Commodore 128 (which I used almost exclusively in 64 mode) I unfortunately purchased an MSD brand hard drive instead of a 1541 drive which almost every piece of software depended on for copy protection purposes. So I had to reverse engineer my software to remove the copy protection before I could play it. One of the last protections on the 1541 was called V-Max (for Verify Maximum) and as a cracker I loved it because it was a third party product - once I cracked it it was the same protection for all titles.
Been there done that. :p

Re:Digitizers?

[wootest]

Not really, just prop the sensor bar up about the distance away that the glasses are supposed to feel like. (If they are supposed to feel like a 70" TV at 4 meters away, just put it 4 meters away, and so on.)

Re:Wii, PS3, Xbox360

[masklinn]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC, Sony is manufacturing the Cells for PS3s, but IBM holds a plethora of patents on that architecture and manufacturing process.

IBM probably gets a cut of every single manufactured Cell CPU. This is IBM we're talking about, not Mother Theresa, they played a big part designing the chip, you can bet they won't let Sony get away with just letting them sell Cells by their own

Higher clock than E3 dev kits?

[saboola]

FTFA: According to the company, Silicon on Insulator technology from IBM helps deliver to Nintendo a generous improvement in processing power, while achieving a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption compared to the 'Gekko'.

Less energy consumption usually means less heat. If there is less heat could we be seeing a higher clocked version of the chip than the one shown at E3?

Re:It's ironic isn't it...

[DrXym]

Except the IBM processors are pretty stonking too. The Cell is basically a 8-core processor - one general purpose CPU and 7 GPU-like cores for handling large amounts of data. Supposedly it is much, much faster than any Intel chip at floating point calculations. This may be why Sony worked with folding@home to produce a PS3 client - to demonstrate that the thing could kick seven shades of shit out of any standard PC when it comes to intensive number crunching. I expect IBM also have their eyes on the thing for all manner of applications, both large and small.

Re:Interested in performance.

[rnmartinez]

I wouldn't worry. I played Resident Evil 4 on my gamecube with Component video cables and progressive scan - the graphics are way better then anything I have seen on ps2 or xbox1, so if you soup up the cube abit and you're doing everything at 480p I bet it will look great

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[account_deleted]

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Unfounded Hype! (or, Nintendo == Apple?)

[ostermei]

(Disclaimer: I have no factual basis whatsoever for the theory I'm about to spout. There's probably zero chance that this will come to pass, but it sure would be cool :)

As has been pointed out here on /. (and elsewhere around the Intertron) on many occasions, Nintendo has some superficial parallels with Apple. Both companies offer products in their respective arenas that may not be the most powerful or the most feature-rich, but their products tend to be of the highest quality (and stylish, to boot). Focusing on doing a limited set of things, but doing those things well seems to be the modus operandi of both companies (see the iPod and the DS).

Nintendo is targeting the Wii at a new market. They're looking for casual gamers, older gamers, gamers who would not have even considered buying a console in the past. These are the buyers that Nintendo really wants to get the Wii to. Now, with the current console release model, companies announce the price and release date of the system many months in advance. This allows current gamers, who keep abreast of these things, to get in their pre-orders right away, essentially buying up all of the initial units right off the bat. The casual gamer generally can't get the system at launch even if they wanted to. If Nintendo wants to court the casual gamer with the Wii, they need to make sure that said casual gamer can actually buy one as soon as it launches.

Now take another look at Apple. When Apple is gearing up to release a new product, they don't make a peep about it ahead of time. They announce a press event a few weeks out, and then keep everything under wraps. Rumors leak out, of course, but that only serves to build up the all-important hype. Then, at the press event, the new products are announced, and immediately they're available on Apple's website and in their meatspace stores. No waiting. No preferential treatment for Apple fanboys. It's first-come, first-served.

With the news that Nintendo has already been receiving shipments one of the main components of the Wii, it's quite possible that the system could be launched very very soon (Joystiq, for example, has floated a rumor that it could be "within weeks" or "by the end of the month."). Perhaps Nintendo has decided to take a page from Apple's book again. Next week Nintendo has scheduled three nearly-simultaneous press events at three separate locations across the globe. As mentioned in my disclaimer above, I have no facts to back this up, but maybe... just maybe... Nintendo's going to do it exactly like Apple.

How cool would it be if next week Nintendo holds their press event, talks up the Wii, shows videos of all the launch games, etc, etc, and then at the end they announce, Jobs-like, that the system is available to purchase right now?

Re:IBM Chips for Cheap -- General Purpose?

[uarch]

1) These chips won't be in PCs. They're a PowerPC derivitive and won't be running your x86 PC code. That being said its already possible to pickup sub-$100 CPUs if you aren't fixated on getting the fastest core out there. (Just like Nintendo didn't want the fastest possible core. They wanted good performance for low-cost)

2) I'd be surprised if someone didn't get Linux up and running on it but I doubt it'll be a common practice.

3) Yeah, Cell is definitely interesting to program since its parallelism is thrown right in your face. There's some compiler work that's been going on for a while to automate the process a little but I don't track it so I have no clue what its current status is (the last white paper I read seemed promising though). It will definitely be used by more than just game consoles & cgi graphics. Its already being applied to some medical imaging, radar and there was just an IBM announcement about an upcoming system for one of the government labs that will be using 16,000 Cells and 16,000 Opterons. It'll be the world's fastest computer when it's finished.

4) While the Xbox core can run general purpose code just fine it is definitely geared towards graphics much more than your standard PC. I don't have a link laying around but there are a few diagrams floating around online that show how the system is architected. The GPU is really the heart of the system with the CPU hanging off to the side - reversed from current PC architectures.
Could the Xbox core be used as a desktop part? Sure. Will it? Not likely. The momentum that would be required to completely rearchitect PCs is enormous (software & hardware would all have to change). This pretty much goes back to point #1.

Anyway. These views in no way represent IBM and I may be completely off-base.