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BlkPaladin on 04 February 2013
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ghost_of_fazz said:
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.

Nope, they're interfaces.

The CPU is in another die. This is the GPU alone.

ARM is a type of CPU, in this case, the Wii Graphics chip had one embedded in it for Security purposes. The Wii U doesn't need a dedicated Wii chip in it since it's CPU is in the same family (read Optimized code for the Wii CPU will run on the Wii U's CPU, much like code for a Pentuim 4 will run on a i7 since they are in the same family). The DSP is a dedicated sound processor Nintendo seems to like to include a DSP for sound processing in its machines instead of using the CPU to process sound.

Both are guesses based on what Nintendo has done in the past with the Wii in the case of the ARM. I thought the DSP was a seprate waffer (possibly the unknown chip on the MCM), but it is possible to be integrated with the GPU.