I know a person who is an investor of MoSys and other technological companies, we talked about Wii U a few days ago and I became surprised with a comment from him about the new console:

"Wii U uses 28nm manufacturing process from NEC and 1T-SRAM from MoSys"

I asked him how he could know it and he told me that this information have been shared to the investors of MoSys because Nintendo partnership is the more important one for them and any signal of losing the deal can be very dangerous for the health of MoSys business.

source

so what does 28nm something, something mean?

My aunt's boyfriend's sister's mom's cousin's dad's wife's uncle's girlfriend's son works at Google and word is they're gonna buy out Sony and Nintendo and launch a new console called Sontendo. True story.

Just the lithography process used to manufacture the chip... in fact smaller numbers give smaller chips, lower consumption and higher clock (performance).

The 28nm is new... AMD (GlobalFoundries) and TSMC  will show the first GPU chip in 28nm at the end of this year.

The RSX GPU uses if I'm no wrong 65nm and the Cell 40nm. Intel processors uses 32nm.

Searching for hits...

All electronics are based on P-N junctions, which are pieces of silicon that have excess electrons on one side (n-type) and fewer elctrons on the other (p-type) this means that current will find it much easier to flow in one direction than the other - electrons trying to go from the p-type to the n-type have to overcome the electric force to get there. By arranging these P-N junctions, we can create logic gates. An example of a logic gate is an OR gate - there are two input wires, and if current is flowing through one wire, or the other, then current will flow through the output. This allows us to compute stuff.

The 28 nm process refers to the fact that each P-N junction is 28 nm accross. There are 1000 000 000 nm in a meter.

In terms of applications, this is a simplification, but basically, using 28 nm instead of 45 nm means that the entire processor will be approximately 28/45 times the size (62%), and will put out 62% of the heat.

EDIT: I was slightly wrong, 28 nm is half the distance between two PN junctions, not the width of each.

ah cool thanks for the explanation guys!

I remember there being rumors about this a few months ago so this might be true. I mean most rumors that come every now and then are true and I can give many examples.

:P

I hope its true 28nm is a lot better then 45nm. Should help out a lot in lowering the production cost also and make the hardware more reliable.

makes sense, Nintendo almost always uses a different approach in their RAM. For example the 3DS is using 128MB of FCRAM instead of using regular DDR type RAM. I'm happy with the performance of MoSys 1-TSRAM in both the GCN and Wii so I'm glad it is continuing.

http://www.ifixit.com/blog/blog/2011/03/28/nintendo-3ds-has-128mb-ram

WOW! Really?

@OP: The 1T-SRAM seems plausible, but 28nm processor from NEC sounds very unlikely.

"Dont know why... but it made me feel kinda sad and disgusted with myself that I actually knew that."

? Why ?

We learned that at school. Thats physics with applied electronics Why should you be disgusted with yourself ?