A news concerning the dev kits, as promised from a poster on NeoGAF
Third-party studios will receive the "v5" dev kits very soon (before the next month). It's even possible that some just got them
- They are apparently the dev kits which where in possession of Nintendo lately (whereas third-parties had the V4).
- There is a noticeable increase of performances with them, a noticeable but not huge however. We don't know if this amelioration is due to a change of components, tweaking of the previously present ones (frequencies, etc.), or a global & light optimization of the hardware, the dev kit itself, the software development kit that may be linked to it, etc.
Some details about the context and assumptions:
- Except maybe big japanese studios (like Capcom), i doubt that other third-parties received these dev kits (much) earlier. It's likely that my sources are one of the firsts to be granted of the latest revisions. This means that all the declarations, the news, from foreign developers, that you've read until now, were in a V4 dev kit framework, before the release of these newest ones.
- A previous post of lherre indicated that Nintendo guys were testing an engine and saw slightly improved results on the V5 compare to V4.
Context: it was posted 1 month ago, when lherre decided to come out of his lair in answer to my very first message to confirm that Wii U was clearly closer to "2x than 5x xbox360". And he basically added that the expected more advanced dev kit in Nintendo headquarters at the time that i've talked about will not change dramatically the Wii U power status. So he surely knew of these engine benchmarks before my intervention, maybe some days, maybe some weeks.
Assumption: considering the 1month+ interval between these internal tests and the V5 delivery to third-parties (minus the dev kits assembly and shipping), there's a chance that the V5 dev kits in the hands of foreign studios have received even more hardware refinements and optimizations than the models used for these Nintendo tests some time before.
- They could have a different code name, but my sources called them V5, as in "the ones following the V4 that they currently develop on". Therefore, it appears they are a rather major revision.
[Now, a detail that could be important, but i'm not sure at all of it, as what my sources told me isn't clear and rely on subjectivity (maybe they haven't understood well what Nintendo said). Take that with caution, and it would be cool if a developer working on the Wii U could precise this.
- It seems these kits may be "near final"
Maybe Nintendo still have more advanced dev kits, but apparently not to a point to constitute a real new future revision (perhaps just small increments in numbers like 5.1/5.2). There may be new dev kit shippings to come but it could point that there is a progressive stabilization in hardware changes. It could also be a word-confusion from my sources between "last" and "latest", or maybe Nintendo thought that when i gathered these infos (a few weeks) but in fact there will be new revisions in the work because they decided to modify the components again, etc. So big grain of salt for this part]
