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oni-link on 08 February 2013
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Aielyn said:
OK, perhaps someone can explain something to me.

The Wii U is speculated to have 320 stream processors, right? That's based on 40 stream processors per block, 8 blocks. And other possible values are either 256 stream processors (32 per block) or 160 stream processors (20 per block). And assuming each one gets one FLOP per cycle, you get the entire set producing up to 352 GFLOPS of processing power, right?

The 360 had just 48 stream processors, with a clock speed just a little slower than that of the Wii U's GPU, but got 240 GFLOPS from them. It did this by having each stream processor capable of up to 10 FLOPs per cycle.

So my question is this: why is it automatically assumed that the Wii U's stream processors are only capable of one FLOP per cycle, given this? It's a serious question, not rhetorical - I'm trying to understand why this isn't under consideration; is it lack of knowledge of GPUs on my part, a detail that I'm not aware of, or is it a possible oversight by the people analysing the system?

The other detail that, to me, goes with this question, is why, given the current speculation about the GPU, do we keep hearing about how the Wii U gets an amazing amount of graphical capability for its power draw? It has been repeatedly suggested or implied that the Wii U's efficiency is remarkably high. How does this mesh with the speculated details? What impact would having stream processors similar to those in the 360 (that is, stream processors that have a net power of multiple FLOPs per cycle) have on the power draw, relative to having more stream processors?


It's because the system was designed by Nintendo.  So automatically anti-Nintendo fanboys (yes there is a lot of them) assume that the system is impotent!!!  I was just reading the DF and B3D website and they were so full of inaccuracies (though there are some good info on them too) it was sickening.  Though to be honest I should have expected that from those two websites.  DF has been butthurt since the Tegra chip debacle on the 3DS; and B3D isn't what it used to be.