The Wii's Brain Exposed 241
Jon Stokes, at the Opposable Thumbs column, discusses a final revelation of the Wii's technical prowess. Though it's been assumed since the early days of the marketing push that the Wii is basically a super-charged GameCube, a post to Acer's Hardware boards would seem to confirm that. Not, as Mr. Stokes says, that that is a bad thing: "I'm no longer nearly as upset about the implications of this move as I was back in August. In fact, thanks in large part to my DS Lite, I've gone from being disappointed at Wii's underpowered hardware to actually anticipating the new console. I plan to pick one up when they become generally available, and I'm even hoping to hook my (nongamer) wife on it."
Wii will take over the world. (Score:3, Funny)
Supercharged! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't care much about what a system's floating point performance is, I only care what it can do. There has been far too much discussion on how powerful the Wii is with very little focus on what it means for games.
Re:Supercharged! (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, none of what you've mentioned matters at all. The PSP is light years better than the DS from a technological point of view, but the DS is mopping the floor with the PSP. Why?
In the end, it all comes down to games.
If Nintendo has the games that are the most fun they will sell the most consoles. The same is true for MS and Sony... If the controller is gimmicky and the games are not very fun, it will become very clear in due course. How anyone can declare winners and losers in the console war at this point is beyond me. The party is really just getting started.
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On the rational end of the issue... As long as it gets the job done who the hell cares.
Re:Supercharged! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, not really. The ISA may be the same, but the microarchitecture is completely different. Your PC's CPU looks nothing like a 386, it just happens to speak the same language (and certainly some new instructions, if not entire operating modes like 64-bit, besides).
The point of the article is that the Wii's CPU is really microarchitecturally similar to the Gecko, down to the number of FP pipelines and such, and is basically a 90nm shrink of the old chip with higher clock speeds.
Now personally I find it hard to believe that IBM would go through the trouble of shrinking the chip to 90nm (which isn't as easy as just applying a scaling factor to your old mask) without tweaking the architecture even if there were no major changes planned. I guarantee there were improvements that they either wanted to add to Gecko but didn't have time/resources for, or flaws in the Gecko that they discovered after it was produced that they would like to fix. The shrink to 90nm is the perfect time to get some of those changes in, so I'm betting they did.
Which brings me back to your point, which was: So what? Indeed, so what? So it's the same chip, only at a much higher frequency and probably with a small percent boost in IPC performance besides. How is that bad? It isn't. It just isn't a super brand new highly experimental chip that requires new (or, going back to mainframes with slews of I/O controllers, old) programming methods. So for anyone who was hoping Nintendo would have some incredible hardware specs for them to drool over, dissapointment may ensue. Oh well, there's still a good chance it will be good enough.
Look at the last generation: The Xbox and GC were fighting for best graphics (xbox winning mostly, but GC showing some astounding performances from time to time), and also fighting for 2nd place. 1st place went to the console with the worst graphics, but they were good enough to be part of that generation, and it had the games. The Wii will certainly be representative of this generation of graphics, even if it will be the worst in that regard. Personally I, like anyone who favors a PS2, just hope it has lots of fun games.
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Sorry to rehash old arguments but your statements are not entirely true. The issue here is how one rates graphics, since we are talking about a very subjective topic. Too say that the PS2 had the worst graphics is deceptive at best (and flat out wrong at worst). The PS2s top games had the highest resolution (only the PS2 had any 1080i games, such as GT4), the highest polygon counts for characters (I believe, and could be wrong, Jak 3 had the highes
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Yep, and subjectively the PS2 had by far the worst graphics of the three. No cross-platform game I played looked as good on the PS2 as the GC or Xbox, and the showcase graphics games for PS2 didn't look as impressive as the Xbox or GC showcase games. For cross-platform, Xbox seemed to eek out GC, but the showcases were very comparable in qual
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Um, no. Dragon's Lair 3D and Enter The Matrix were both playable (well, as "playable" as lousy games can be) at 1080i on the Xbox. Further, there were a bunch more games (mainly sports titles, perhaps most notably a couple of Tony Hawk games) that were playable at 720p.
Further, trying to argue that the PS2's graphics were comparable to those on the Xbox based on a very few PS2 games that pushed the console hard is disingenuous at best. For example, Konami
Backwards compatibility means no changes (Score:3, Insightful)
To back your more general point up, although people seem to have a low opinion of what the Gamecube hardware was capable of it's unwarranted. It's true that many games
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No it wouldn't. Backward compatability is an ISA (as in the interface to the chip) feature, not a microarchitectural feature. This is why a modern x86 CPU can run th
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I'll admit I'm confused by your usage of 'embedded'. I don't think of 'embedded' as something you stick a CD loaded with software into. And I'm used to games that hit a trouble spot dropping in frame rate rather than choking,
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Heh, right, I forgot about that. Pretty snazy solution if you can hack it.
I generally consider consoles to be embedded because they do one thing, namely play games, and one piece of software gets complete access to the hardware, down to the metal, while it's fulfilling that role.
Good enough for me. Though hacking on my 286 was "down to the metal", even if I did lean on DOS sometimes to handle disk access for me.
This distinction is b
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The locked cache existed in the Gamecube, but the bigger point about allowing general improvements to be turned on via a register is a good one that I hadn't thought of. I should've remembered it because I used exactly that feature during Pin2000! MediaGX's buil
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That's more than slightly disingenuous. Maintaining the x86 instruction set does not, in any way, even remotely imply that the processor you're working on right now is just a 386, but faster. There have been fundamental, major evolutions in CPU technology between that 386 and your current CPU, which make them completely different animals that just happen to look (sort of) the same from the OS' point of view.
This isn't true for the Wii hardware vs the GC hardware
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Call me when I can turn off in-order writes (Score:3, Interesting)
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Nice conspiracy theory there, also. I don't know much about this topic but I suspect there is a real reason why your suggestion hasn't been implemented, not just Microsoft convincing Intel and AMD to kill performance because they don't feel like improving their kernel.
It's not a single pet feature, it's an example (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want a laundry list, I can provide one, but we can start with this small list of things, which were also true of the i386 as well, making the current CPUs hopped up 386s:
o Too few general purpose registers (this one's glaringly obvious, and compared to dumping another 2M of cache onto a chip, it's relatively easy to fix, but it's only been partially fixed in the 64 bit implementations, and there it was more or less a matter of maintaining binary compatib
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I'll note, though, that with the exception of more registers, all the features you want seem oriented towards highly demanding applications like real-time systems and scientific computation. That's not really what the x86 is about. Modern Intel/AMD CPUs aren't necessarily primitive just because the development effort was put into bread-and-butter things like branch prediction instead of features that are elegant but ultimately not so useful for mass-market consumers.
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That's a memory consistancy model issue, so of course it is the same. Besides, weaker conistancy models require stronger memory barrier instructions. I think the IA32 "processor consistancy" model is a good trade off, personally. Hyperthreading was just a bad idea, as was the whole Netburst architecture.
Most of the things you list in your follow on post are just features you wish x86 processors had -- even though some of them do have those features, demonstratin
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your comment reminded me of the tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell, when they're mischievously investigating a sniper computer and are astonished that it's "a sub-turing machine!"
(yeah, I know they're referring to the Turing Test for AI and not the Turing machine you're talking about, but I can't always control the way my brain makes these connections!)
Not really. (Score:2)
Coppermine PIII (800MHz,
PS2->PS3
G3 w/Altivec (PPC 7xx, 400MHz,
XBox -> XBox 360
UltraSPARC IIIi -> Dual Xeon MP (Prestonia, 1.67Ghz,
If you want to compare processors in terms of the "new configurations" in terms of 386, that's the best I could come up with.
Since PS2/XBox are switching architectures to PPC (like the GC/Wii), they all end up as i386ISA, but they come from
Wii isn't underpowered except (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re: Wii is EDTV at launch. (Score:2)
If you thought they looked fine on your TV, then the Wii will look fine in 480p and 16:9 also.
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And I can find a pretty nice lo-def TV that I already own for $000, and it comes pre-installed.
I won't deny that HD source video can and usually does look noticeably better than standard def, but I will deny that the average person cares enough about that improvement to spend several hundred dollars on an aesthetic upgrade.
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10 years from now, when HD and DRm idiots finally settle down, the HDtv will be more commonplace. people who spent $2000 for an HD set 2-3 years ago are going to have to upgrade to the newest standards or else they are stuck with the same lo def si
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No, I didn't. I stated that lots of people are buying TVs, I made no mention of what type other than that the proportion which are HD will obviously rise going forward. Your assertion that it's currently a very low percentage is not backed up by my own experience, or what I am reading. As an example, this article [usatoday.com] says that 1 in 6 homes already have at least 1 HDTV. And this one [contactmusic.com] says that HDTV sales are expected to exceed SDT
And if my current TV works fine? (Score:2)
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None, except that TV sets wear out, and when the time comes to buy the next one you might as well go high-def.
Then again, if you are Joe Average and satisfied with your current TV, you might also be satisfied with your current PS-2, X-Box, or Game Cube, and have no incentive to buy a Wii either.
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It'll go nicely with the $500 PS3 and $400 Xbox 360 that you didn't buy.
Re:Wii isn't underpowered except (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know. The PS3 has a very low ecstasy to glow stick ratio.
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Nintendo DS uses OpenGL (Score:5, Interesting)
True of the GBA, but Nintendo DS uses a subset of OpenGL, similar to the "GX" API used by the GameCube.
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Here's the deal: I love old arcade games. I have a PSP, and two of my favorite game UMDs are the Midway and Namco classic collectiosns.(you can call me a chump for not doing homebrew if you must). I also enjoy side scrollers, top scrollers and, though I've never encountered one, I'd probably like a bottom scroller too.
But I love 3D games as well. I love eye-candy. I love the imersive experience of a Far Cry or NFS title.
Am I wrong to love both? Should I on
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Here's the deal: like most members of the human species, game developers are single minded bozos. If you give them a console like the PS3, the ONLY thing they'll do is fancy 3d games. Or almost. So the point is, because of the way they think, you can't really have both on the same co
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What I have the problem with is the people who appear to be insisting that no one "needs" the better graphics hardware and, ironically, that we do "need" the interesting controller hardware of the Wii.
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No, it's going to be limited by the controller. The Wii's controller is the most fun.
Or maybe not.
My statement is only slightly less absurd than yours. "Fun" is most certainly not going to be limited by graphics. Is "Super Mario Bros" less fun than "Charlie's Angels" simply because its graphics are very modest compared to the more recent 3D game?
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Just look at the numbers. Many people were screaming about how Live and other online services were going to be the bread and butter of consoles last generation. All three systems launched with promises about their online support. Only one of the three consoles delivered, and it was the one which arguably was the worst when it came to online that won out.
Today we've finally reahed a point w
I've Said it before and I'll say it again. (Score:2)
This is also a social issue. U
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I think that's a rather optimistic prediction of how quickly HDTV is going to take over. Given current HDTV prices, HDTV has a *long* way to go before most anyone I know will be willing to buy one. I wouldn't be surprised if HDTV becomes the norm among people with media-and-technophilic tendencies within 3 years, but I'm also not so sure that that's the Wii's target market. Nintendo hasn't really been after pe
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You forget how Nintendo makes its money. Most of their handhelds have very obvious shortcomings which they con
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I very much doubt it. HD-TV adoption is still very low and will stay there for quite a while. If HD-TV would ever become a must-have in the lifetime of the Wii Nintendo could just release a improved and fully compatible Wii (just like GBAsp or DSlite) with an faster GPU that could do HD-TV and have solved the problem easily.
While I doubt that HD-TV is an issue, I however think the lack of plain CPU and GPU power will become a problem very q
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I don't know how many other people share this stance, but I have no interest in buying a PS3 or 360 until I have an HDTV in my game room, because I've seen the 360 on Standard (the TV in my game room [when High Defini
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They may rehash their portable hardware, but it's not something they've done with their home console systems often, and even more rarely do they add new functionality to the systems instead of improving aesthetics or ergonomics.
Like one of the other posters said, as much as this is an attempt to keep the cost of the console itself down, it is probably an attempt to get developers take their focus away from graphics and instead on gameplay and actual content, and to keep the development costs of t
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Not quite - I know the reason I paid so much. It's because I want to see a great picture.
You get what you paid for. Caveat emptor, peeps. If you get an HDTV, prepare to seek out the content made for HDTV. Otherwise, it's just another TV, now isn't it?
And that's the point. People will seek out that content, and they'll get it from Xbox360 and PS3, but not from t
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Yeah, when they're selling the things as Today's Special Value on QVC, the notion that it's somehow a videophile-only market is mistaken.
The idea that the Wii is going after the "secondary TV" market is interesting. I expect, given the cost we're likely to see, it will be pretty common to own either an X-box 360 or PS3, plus a Wii.
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Nothing "underpowered " about the Gamecube/Wii (Score:2)
While I absolutely love the visuals from the 360 and PS3, given the still relatively paltry penetration of HDTV sets in North America, the new ma
Exactly! (Score:2)
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What would you have said when Nintendo did a improved N64 instead of the Gamecube? When they simply added a new motion controller and left the rest mostly as is? I mean N64 could do pretty graphics as well, for its time. Today however the N64 is horribly outdated and no high-end motion controller would make we want to play that thing when I can play Shadow of the Colossus or Katamary on a PS2.
The Wii graphics don't look that bad currently, since most people are still left with Gamecube, XBox1 and PS2, so
Oh, absolutely. (Score:2)
It's been said before... (Score:2, Interesting)
The difference in required processing power to properly render the larger textures and more detailed models at 1080p versus what the Wii needs to do at 480p is huge. All that processing power that Microsoft and Sony will throw into 1920*1080=2073600 pixel is going to be much more than Nintendo has to worry about at 640*480=307200
2073600/307200 = 6.75. Sony and Microsoft need to be 6.75 times as powerful as Nintendo's console to ma
And on top of that... (Score:2)
The power users are the ones who need the bragging rights of "more power" and are the ones who put emphasis on flash over function.
The family only cares about having fun together as a family. My daughter and I still have fun with Diddy Kong Racing on our oh-so-dreadfully-inferior {/SARCASM} Nintendo 64. We don't care that it doesn't look
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Wii: 1-core G3 @ 729Mhz
Xbox 360: 3-core G3 @ 3200Mhz
Roughly 13 times the cpu power, meaning about twice the instructions per pixel. Hmmm.
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Instead of rendering at 1280x720 or 1300x768 (whatever the overscan res is?) they instead render some of their games in the 1024x600 range (hi PGR3) and then upsample it claiming it's HD.
Fun all round guys, fun all round.
This sounds interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
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The Wii's Brain Exposed (Score:3, Funny)
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Power isn't the problem (Score:2)
But I think to make that argument would take some serious rhetorical gymnastics. The problems with gaming clearly lie in the ideas, the general difficulty of executing complex ideas (programming complicated things, gaming or otherwise, is hard), the overemphasis on 3D graphics, and the stereotyping of controls.
All of these interrelate; in particular the emphasis on 3D graph
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Personally, I see that "Power" could be the biggest problem in the upcomming generation but in the complete opposite way that some people predict. In order to get the "Next Generation Graphics" (that the PS3 and XBox 360 offer
Gameplay (Score:2)
Ok, so we know Nintendo produces some fun 1st-party games. And thats a great thing. If you love Nintendo's games then you know what you want, definitely a Wii.
The Wii will not be particularly powerful hardware-wise. Some fanboys say, its not next-gen or whatever buzzword you like. Nintendo fans say, that doesn't matter, because art direction trumps graphical muscle, gameplay and plot trump flashy graphics and nice physics. Its a fair argument.
The thing I wonder about is, t
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Go Wii (Score:2, Insightful)
Pft no thanks (Score:2)
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Is Wii sports worth $50? Eh, not to me, but the point is you can't directly compare to previous launches, because this isn't like previous launches.
Technology becomes cheaper over time, but inflation makes dollars worth less. The fact that they've always been $200 is more a testiment to Nintendo's commitment to low prices than evidence that a new c
Talking about Broadway or Hollywood? (Score:2)
How much has the price of petrol/gasoline increased since 1991 when the Super NES came out? How much has the median price of 2000 hours of labour/labor increased? How much has the price of health care increased?
Which is why you can buy "Plug and Play TV Games" based on NES era technology for 20 USD or less.
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And maybe it's a function of Nintendo's previous track record, and I'm giving them flak because they've done too well in the past.
That may all be the case.
Nonetheless, it still feels like I'm getting pretty much the same tech for $50 more than it cost five years ago, when I'm accustomed (in the computer hardware world) to paying the same money for better tech as time passes. That's not a response that's good for Nintendo (and may expla
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http://curmudgeongamer.com/2006/05/history-of-con
Inflation is real and calculable and extremely relevant to such a discussion.
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I know that, in terms of real purchasing power, it's cheaper than previous consoles. This doesn't change the fact that I paid $200 for each previous iteration, irrespective of what that $200 was worth (and, from a personal standpoint, two of those consoles were from HS/college, when I was making a hell of a lot less money than I am now, so the actual value of that $200 was much, much higher than the $250 will be, to me, in November).
Perhaps I'm being unfair to Nintendo, and t
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When I go to buy a new console, I want the new console excitement. That means I want the games that are going to justify me purchasing a new console, the things I can do now that I couldn't do before.
Back compat is cool (and, if you look around the net hard enough, you can probably see me railing against MS on the BC issue for the 360), but it's not why I buy a new console. I'll make use of it when I've got it, but it's not a real
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The extra $50 isn't a deal breaker, it's just something I'm not happy about.
My point about the bells and whistles is that I've got by 360 for those things, and I expected to pay the premium for the gimmicks and the cutting-edge graphics. That's the role they marketed it to fill, and that's the role I bought
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As cool as the Wii looks, it can't be your only console if you really want a "next gen" game experience.