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timmah on 04 February 2013
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HappySqurriel said:
Aielyn said:

What am I talking about? Look back at the RV770 chip for a moment. The centre of the chip has all of the main GPU stuff, and then there's some stuff around the edges, most of which is easily identified.

Now look at the Wii U's chip. Yes, there's the eDRAM, etc, on the left. And they've identified a heap of things on the right... but the odd part is all of the unmarked area. About a quarter of the entire chip is entirely unaccounted for, including a huge gap near the centre. There are visible details, so we can be fairly confident that it's not just empty space. So what is it? What hasn't been identified, and what impact does it have on the system?

I don't suppose anyone knows if there's an equivalent die image for the Wii's GPU, for comparison?

I'm not much of a hardware guy but I suspect what is marked as "ARM(?)" and "DSP(?)" is likely the Wii's CPU/GPU ...

 

Knowing Nintendo, if I was to guess what the unmarked sections were I would expect them to be instructions designed to increase the over-all efficiency of the system. I don't want to speculate too much, but I would expect Nintendo to do something like increase the number of tessellation units on the GPU (or something of that nature) which wouldn't increase theoritical performance but could result in better real-world results if used well.

Exactly, Nintendo has always been all about customization & efficiency, so that makes sense. The GC was about 1/3 the theoretical performance (gflops) of the original Xbox if my memory serves me, but was roughly equal in real world performance due to the fixed functions & customizations in the GPU. Same is very likely here, some fixed function logic (including tessellation unit(s)) could give a large visual boost when coded for properly. The general consensus on NeoGaf seems to be about 350GFlops based only on the portions identified, not counting the unknown logic on the rest of the GPU. Since the unknown parts account for 30-40% of the available die space, we could still be in the 500GFlops theoretical range. Combine that with potential customized fixed-function, tesselation units, 'special sauce', efficiency, whatever is hidden there, and it will certainly be able to produce some beautiful games.

Wii mode uses the WiiU CPU, graphics processing of Wii games is done right in the WiiU GPU.