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walsufnir on 31 January 2015
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curl-6 said:
walsufnir said:
captain carot said:

As for Espresso, it likely isnt a 970. Its as well no stock 750 PPC. THere where already changes made for Gekko, like some SIMD, FPU...

I go with marcan in this context as he is quite a knowledgable guy when it comes to Wii/WiiU hardware and many things we know about the Espresso is coming from him and his findings. In general it's of course not a stock 750 but derived from it and I guess if he says it's 750 we can likely believe him in this context. 

 

Edit: Concerning the ISA I found this: http://www.radgametools.com/bnkhist.htm

"Added Wii-U support for Bink 2 - play 30 Hz 1080p or 60 Hz 720p video! We didn't think this would be possible - the little non-SIMD CPU that could!" I didn't know it doesn't feature SIMD...

According to Marcan it has SIMD, just weaker SIMD compared to its competitors.

They basically compromised raw power in exchange for backards compatibility. That said, it has some advantages over the last gen HD twins that help mitigate its lower clock speed; better IPC, out of order execution, the ability to offload work to the GPGPU and dedicated audio chip, etc.

"Weaker" is one way to put as we could see in the further discussion in this thread but either way.

Keeping compatibility sadly didn't work out for Nintendo and I guess it would've been better to go for more power. OOOE is nice, of course but Xenon being IO could be helped with software to help with branch prediction leading to not so harsh pipeline stalls. Btw, GPGPU was also done on 360 but we don't know if also in games: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.219.4747

As of yet it is still unknown by how much games can benefit from GPGPU, especially how much GPU you have to sacrifice to help the CPU (leaving even less for the GPU to do $graphics).

But we were talking about the CPU: Yes, it has 3 cores. Yes, it has quite a bit cache. Yes, it has a good IPC. Yes, it fits nicely in the WiiU and its GPU. But there is no secret about it, no special ability in the CPU hidden. It is a 3 core ppc with a low clock rate where some features are there to help the low clock rate.