drkohler on 29 March 2012
| Totaldemon said: Oh, and the Wii U will not be limited to a single thread. It's rumored to be a tri-core IBM cpu based on "Watson" aka the Power7 CPU from IBM which does out of order execution, and does 4..YES FOUR simultaneous threads per core...so that tri-core would do 12 threads. |
As much as I'd love to see something like a Power7 CPU in a console, consider that:
The Power7 is a server processor. It has two memory interfaces for paired ECC DMMs and shitloads of cache to make use of the quad-threaded cores. (It also comes in 4,6,8 cores and burns a shitload of power). You'll never see such a processor in a console. Maybe a significantly trimmed down version. And four threads per core doesn't make sense in gaming console either. Check websites where people compare gaming performance on Intel I7s with/without multithreading enabled. Those 12 cores processing a single program ("the game") would probably lower performance, not increase it.
