Wii U vs PS4 vs Xbox One FULL SPECS (January 24, 2014)

[zarx]

snowdog said:
Great thread but thought I'd make 1 correction, 1 suggestion and also give you all a little more background on the Power7 if I may..?

Firstly it's highly unlikely for the system RAM to be XDR2 as despite Rambus designing it 5 or 6 years ago none of the memory manufacturers have given it the time of day for some reason. No idea why though. GDDR3 is more likely imo (see below).

I'd also like to suggest that GDDR5 is unlikely for the GPU VRAM as it'll be too much of a nightmare to keep cool so I'd say that, again, GDDR3 is a more likely choice.

As for the Power7 there are developer leaks on Gaf that suggest that the Power7-based CPU will have 3 cores with developers only having access to 2...but if Nintendo and IBM have decided to do that there are some beneficial trade-offs that will arise from that. Only having 3 cores would mean that they can up the clockspeed as well as increase the eDRAM. A quad core with 16Mb of eDRAM would realistically be clocked under 3.0GHz but having an extra core disabled (all Power7 CPUs have 8 cores with the lower end CPUs having some of them disabled) could indeed mean we could end up with a CPU clocked at more than 3GHz and maybe as much as 24 or 32Mb of eDRAM which would mean it'll fly like poo off a shovel!!!

The Power7 family of processors is currently the most powerful family of processors on the planet so we don't have to worry about the power of the thing. It's going to be heavily modified to suit gaming application rather than server and AI application but given the amount of processing power behind it we'll probably see the PS4 and 720 being powered by one too.

Well there are rumours that the next generation of AMD enthusiest GPUs will use XDR2, we will see what happens with that but I doubt it would be used in the Wii U to expensive. As for GDDR5 being to hot that hasn't really been a problem for several years, these days even low end cards use GDDR5 like this passively cooled 6450

GDDR3 is much to slow unless you clock it really high but then it ends up hotter than GDDR5 plus no one makes GDDR3 anymore so it would probably be more expensive than using GDDR5 (which the RV770 was designed to use).