| vanguardian1 said: It was my impression that the Wii's graphic "TEV" unit(s) could be programmed to do a variety of graphical effects, pixel shaders included, but at a cost to the fill rate for each "trick" used. The Gamecube had 1 TEV unit, and there's a lot of debate that the extra size of the graphics chip in the Wii is due to their being a 2nd TEV unit on board. But since anyone who would give the answer to that is under NDA with Nintendo, so we probably won't know for some time. Also, another board programmer mentioned that the wii has stencil buffers for shadows, while the gamecube did not. |
I just wanted to expand on this from the information I could find online and combine this with "reasonable" speculation ...
The Gekko processor was built using a 180nm process and had a die size of 43 mm2 and the Broadway processor is built using a 90nm process and has a die size of 18.9 mm2. If you were to produce the Gekko using a 90nm process you would expect the processor to have a die size in the 11 mm2 range so the Broadway processor is (roughly) 1.5 times as large as you would expect it to be if it was simply the Gekko processor. The most likely improvement to the processor (which would increase its size) would be to boost the L2 cache from 256KB to 512KB which would (hypothetically speaking) increase its performance dramatically because you would have far less cache misses. Even with this increased cache you would expect the processor to be in the 16 mm2 to 17 mm2 range, and it is likely that the processor has recieved further upgrades.
The Flipper was bult using a 180nm process and had a die size of 106 mm2 and the Hollywood processor was built using a 90nm process and has a die size of 72 mm2. Once again, one would expect the Hollywood processor to be in the 30 mm2 range if it was simply the Flipper processor produced using a 90nm process. The size difference on the GPU is quite dramatic and indicates some massive changes on the processor.
