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curl-6 on 30 November 2012
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Soleron said:
curl-6 said:
Soleron said:
curl-6 said:
Ah, the Megahertz Myth. I remember this old fallacy from back in the 90s, and I can't believe people STILL think clock speed = power.

Each Wii U core takes up no more than 1/3 of the area of a 360 core. It is therefore not faster per-clock, unless a miracle happened at IBM. Performance = clock speed * performance per clock (approximately, yes it's a tautology).

To use an example from the 90s, would you rather have a 600MHz Pentium III or a 1.6GHz Pentium 4? The Pentium III was faster per-clock, but the difference is so big that you'd obviously get the P4.

Size is also not necessarily a cast-iron indicator of power; there's other factors. (Latency, GPGPU) This hacker fellow already said that comparing it to the 360 CPU and surmising it's much weaker is a mistake. 

OK.

I'm only gonna say this once.

Fuck GPGPU.

Pretend it does not exist.

Apart from that, YES, the CPU is not the only factor in the system. But all the info we have (die size, clock speed, approximate architecture, resulting games) indicates that it is the major bottleneck to performance. That is the only point I am making here.

He said that assuming it's much weaker (as in, lol 1/3 of the clock 1/3 of the performance) is a mistake. He hasn't said whether it's stronger or weaker. I think the evidence still means it's weaker and that is a problem.

Why? Because devs won't code to take advantage of it? I'm confused.

As for resulting games, I don't think launch games can be fairly used as a good measuring stick of a system's capabilities.

I don't doubt that the 360 CPU has more grunt, (though whether this can be worked around by clever developers, like the Gamcube/Wii's lack of programmable pixel/vertex shaders, is another matter) but this doesn't overly bother me; the Wii offered the best gaming experiences for me this generation and it's what, 1/5 as strong as the Wii U's CPU based on clock speed and core count alone? (Not to mention cache size) The ability to run games on the level of Assassin's Creed 3 is enough for me, I'm more interested in the gamepad.