| Viper1 said: Excellent article, Ricard, To further raise ire with the technical director and the Frostbite 3 engine, their issue seems to stem from the clock rate the Wii U's CPU. Similar to how the Dynasty Warriors developer had a problem with the CPU clock. What makes me wonder is how they plan to port the Frostbite 3 engine over to the PS4 and Next X given that they too have lower clock speeds than the current HD consoles (both rated at 3.2 Ghz)? Clock speed has been THE main issue for any developer that has complained about the Wii U's CPU or performance or power, etc... Yet that same clock speed issue is staring them in the face for ALL next generation consoles. |
The guy who unveiled the Wii U's CPU speed stated that it should "win big on IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) for most code" compared to the PS3/360 CPUs, and Criterion stated that "while it is a lower clock speed, it punches above it's weight in a lot of other areas," and that comparing it to Cell/Xenon (PS3/360's CPUs) based on clockspeed was "apples to oranges."
Espresso may be slower clocked, and have less hardware threads, but it has advantages of its own; a shorter pipeline which means less processing time is lost if it makes a mistake, an audio DSP to handle sound so the CPU doesn't have to, (apparently sound can take up a whole core on Xenon) a GPGPU to further take the strain off Espresso, out-of-order execution compared to Xenon/Cell's in-order execution, and three times as much L2 cache as Xenon.
It's not as weak as it's made out to be.
