| superchunk said: RE the shaders... Can someone post a source of actual devs saying it has 160 vs 320? I've had 320 for a very long time due to Chipworks and NeoGaf threads discussion combined with various tech sites. |
A typical AMD GPU with 160 Shaders would take 67mm^2 while I dissected Wii U's die shot by measuring each block and come to conclusion that there is at least 85mm^2 available for purely GPU related silicon(Stream Processing Units, Raster Output Units, Texture Mapping Units, Compute Units, Memory Controller DDR3, etc...).
Another indication that is not a 160 shader GPU is that Wii U's GPU codenamed "Latte" has 8 blocks where SPU's/Shaders are located with 32 SRAM Cell's/Cache and not 16 SRAM Cell's/Cache. AMD's GPU architecture involving VLIW5 is 16 SRAM Cell's/Cache connected to 20 SPU's/Shaders while in Wii U's GPU die shot we can clearly see 32 SRAM Cell's which indicates 40 SPU's/Shaders.
Anyway Wii U's GPU is fully custom as Chipworks said and I have found die shots of various dGPU's and iGPU's from AMD and Wii U's GPU does not even remotely similar except in SRAM Cell/Cache placements. You won't find any sources of developers actually saying numbers of Shaders/SPU's because they would broke NDA and be sued.
