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| SubiyaCryolite said: Thats good to know. Part of me wonders why the PS3 had 7 active cores and the 360 had 6 active threads each rated 3.2GHz. I mean, if the Wii U's reported 1.2GHz TriCore CPU can handle 90% of the same games just fine. Seems like overkill/highly inefficient hardware from Sony and Microsoft. |
The PS3 and 360 CPUs were designed more for brute force, not efficiency. They get the job done by throwing tons of clock cycles at the task, and in the PS3's case, by having 7 SPUs to share the load.
Wii U's CPU, Espresso, is a very different beast. It's clocked low, but goes to great lengths to get as much performance as possible per clock cycle. It has 3 times as much on-board L2 cache memory as the 360, a shorter pipeline which means less operations are wasted if it makes a mistake, a separate chip to handle audio, a GPGPU to help out as well, and out of order execution so its not restricted to doing things in a pre-set order and can instead do it in an order that's more efficient for the specific task.
Wii U's 1.2GHz core can keep up with its 3.2GHz competitors simply because its built to focus on per-cycle efficiency.
EDIT: Ah Razordragon, great minds think alike! ;)
