Nintendo Wii: Respectable Specs

[KruzeS]

I'd like to say flat out that I didn't like the article one bit. Far too much positive spin.

That said though, there's already enough evidence showing the Wii is not just a GC speed bump, as Squrriel mentioned. I can't find the source, but we have these numbers roughly verified through multiple sources.

CPU:
GC Gekko - 180nm process, 43mm² diesize.
Wii Broadway - 90nm process, 19mm² diesize.
If no transistors had been added, the expected size of Gekko at 90nm would be 11mm². A clock bump does not justify a 75% increase in size. This is speculated to be added L2 cache.

GPU:
GC Flipper - 180nm process, 110mm² diesize.
Wii Hollywood - 90nm process, 72mm² diesize.
If no transistors had been added, the expected size of the Flipper at 90nm would be 26mm². A clock bump does not justify 175% increase in size. Possibilities? Extra pipelines and texture units, more complex T&L, etc.

Besides, a point that is comonly brought up is programable shaders. Despite the fact that programable shaders are great in terms of flexibility, the fact is that most of the time they're used to produce some pretty standard effects. The GC's non-programable pipeline already supported some of these common effects, and the Wii is likely to have improved on that support. A simple example is bump mapping: programable pixel/fragment shaders are used in most platforms; the Wii/GC TEV supports it out of the box; one of the vector processors on the EE was used in the PS2. Lack of flexibility, though, may mean developers won't just come up with new tricks later in the generation.