forethought14 said:
To be fair, 35W =/= to 160 shaders. I'm not denying 160, and not saying it's more than that, but the GPU could definitely be very low powered and also have higher amount of shaders than Wii U. If you take everything into consideration, Latte runs at roughly 18-ish watts. I stated this before, the Mobility Radeon HD 5650 is a 400 shader graphics card, clocked at 650mhz, 40nm process, and it runs from 15-19 watts depending on load. This is a mobile part, but it was originally based on the PC versions, so a similar idea could have easily applied to Latte. 15-19 watts is the enire graphics card, the GPU itself will run about 3-5 less watts then that. So in the end, Wii U could have very well have been a 400 shader part and still retain the 33-36W it runs at. Though, it's obviously not a 400 shader part. In my view about die size, I think there is obviously more to the GPU than meets the eye. No, I'm not being a "delusional fanboy" making it more than it is (it's not compared to the 5 billion transistor X1 silicon), but sizes shouldn't be completely ignored, it's simply too much logic for a conventional 160 shader GPU. If we take measurements in terms of transistors, Latte at 40nm is 156.21mm2 in size (the size of the GPU die), 40nm AMD GPUs are about 6.00 - 6.25 million transistors per mm2 (I averaged several AMD 40nm GPU in terms of size and transistors that were available, and found other averages and came up with that average, a good Google search does wonders), meaning Latte has roughly 717-756 million transistors without the eDRAM, and for comparison, Xenos is 232 million transistors without eDRAM. eDRAM in Latte is around 220 million transistors if it is indeed 40nm Renesas eDRAM, so total, Latte is close to 1 billion transistors. This means Latte has about 3x more transistors compared to Xenos, likely having a lot to do with more modern architecture, and other fixed-function silicon Nintendo decided to include in it. BC stuff is likely very small part of the GPU, so I'm pretty positive that it doesn't take up much room at all, a few mm2 at most. I don't know about what other people say, but a 160 shader part made up of 750 million transistors is not something to scoff at, most conventional 160 shader parts are much smaller than this. The HD 6450 has 160 shaders, 40nm but is 370 million trasnsistors. And to compare with a GPU with more shaders, 400 shader processor part HD 5670 at 40nm is 627 million transistors. |
Can you please space your posts. 
There's just one thing that's a little funny about the mobility radeon hd 5650. The clock can range from anywhere from 450 to 650. The reported TMU's that we first thought was 16 so why does this part have 20 of them ?
If the system had an hd 5650 the ports wouldn't be so troublesome! These inconsistencies bring me to suspect that it's using a desktop part!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOA1WJ0tNT0
See that video right over there. That card is running battlefield 3 on HIGH settings at 44fps average OVER 720p! (This would suggest that the wii u IS SOMEWHAT on par with the X1 but real world results tell a very different story.) The wii u shouldn't even have a problem outing the ps360 in games like batman and why isn't SC blacklist a whole lot better ? Something tells me here that the card your mentioning might not be all consistent with how the wii u performed so far. BTW PC ports of console games are abysmally shit so don't even bring up the excuse that the PC has the more optimized verstions. (It's not even funny.)
If the latte truly had 717-756 transistors then why does the system not suck up more than 35 watts ? (ignoring the mobile parts ofcourse.)
It wouldn't some cut down hd 5550 it would be a cutdown hd 5750! It would have much more than 400 shaders and even then the performance shown so far haven't being very consistent!
Just so you know the hd 5550 also has 627 million transistors with a die space of 104mm^2. So adding some modifications such as the eDRAM while also disabling the shaders would lead me to believe that these list of components are very consistent with the observed phenomena so far.
