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Forums - Nintendo - Lets analyze the potential of the Wii U Memory

dahuman on 13 October 2012
Demensha said:
You have to ask yourself a few other unknowns. Speed and channel of ram also memory bandwidth of CPU. Hope this helps

The Core i7 processor supports up to three DDR3 memory channels. That is an additional memory channel over what the industry is using now - dual memory channels. As some are fond of pointing out, 3 memory channels will automatically give 50 % more memory bandwidth over 2 memory channels even if everything else remains the same. Great, isn't it?
Using DDR3-1333 memory, triple-channels would give you a memory bandwidth of 64 GB/s. That is a tremendous amount of memory bandwidth. But do we really, really need that kind of bandwidth? That is what we will be looking at today.


In these tests, we used the Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition running at 3.2 GHz. The L3 cache was set to run at 2.6 GHz. The DDR3 memory modules were set to run at 1066 MHz with timings of 7-7-7-20. Power Director7 was used to convert 3 minutes of a HD video (1080), while Cinebench was set to use all 8 threads.

Even with 50 % more memory bandwidth, Power Director 7 was just 9 seconds faster with 3 memory channels than it was with 2 memory channels. That's a completely negligible difference of 1 %.

Running with a single memory channel did result in a much longer render time. Power Director 7 took 84 seconds longer to complete the conversion. That's a difference of almost 11 %, compared to the conversion times with 2 or 3 memory channels.

So that some info about an i7 not the CPU in the wii u, and I imagine the i7 would kill the wii u CPU (my thoughts)

So back to your question. Would it load fast or yield better performance? Well the answer is yes.
A single lane highway can only let 1 vehicle pass at a time. Even at 60 mph
Two lane highway yields two vehicles at a time. However at 30mph you can expect the same data flow ( based on equal chips ). Another question is can each core pull from either lane ? If so a semi truck can be in lane 1 going to the CPU while a shitload of corvettes and Ferrari zip to the gpu.
Another thing is the memory controller that tells the info when and where and how fast to move. how good is that? Being on the same die I would bet its pretty fast. That being said there is no doubt in my mind that the wii u could pull from all 2 gigs if it wanted to, for gaming its up to Nintendo to allow that, which I also see happening with 512 extra ram for gaming to help with ports from 720/ps4.
Off topic*
I'm new but ill get in on the betting and predictions. 720 will have a full 4 gigs with ps4 having 2 full gigs for gaming with .5-1 gb for OS.
With wii u detailed why would they spend the money for an insanely geared product ? Slap an extra gig or 2 of ram 4 cores and a underclocked semi top of the line gpu for 400$ and make a profit.

PS sorry for typing I'm on my iPad and I hate typing with it. Hope this helps I am by no means an expert. But can say this I still use a socket 775 I could OC it but I don't q9550 with a 670 gtx 4 gigs of old school ram and I pull over 60fps maxed out in every game on my pc. Don't have crisis, but I still have to liquid cool it. So don't dismiss old technology!

The fastest i7 currently does quad-channel RAM, and if you run 2800mhz RAM and get the latency to stable below 8 then your ass would explode with bandwidth and speed. No console can match that kind of power without costing a lot of money lol.



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JEMC on 13 October 2012
lilbroex said:
JEMC said:
lilbroex said:

I notice that the Wii U has 4 RAM chips. That means that it is 512X4 as opposed to 1024X2 as I thought before.

If you look at any graphics card (with GDDR5 memory) or RAM sticks (with DDR3 mem.), you will notice that most of them use chips of 256 MB of capacity. Your asumption of 1 GB/chip was a bit... optimistic. And since we haven't seen the other side of the board we can't even be sure if WiiU uses 256 or 512 MB chips.

The Wii U has 2 GB or RAM. It has 4 RAM chips. What more needs to be seen?

I've bolded the answer to your question.

There are more things in the motherboard that we haven't seen, mostly because they probably are on the other side of the board. For example the 8 or 32 GB of flash storage.



Please excuse my bad English.

Former gaming PC: i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Current gaming PC: R5-7600, 32GB RAM 6000MT/s (CL30) and a RX 9060XT 16GB

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.

Demensha on 13 October 2012
dahuman said:
Demensha said:
You have to ask yourself a few other unknowns. Speed and channel of ram also memory bandwidth of CPU. Hope this helps

The Core i7 processor supports up to three DDR3 memory channels. That is an additional memory channel over what the industry is using now - dual memory channels. As some are fond of pointing out, 3 memory channels will automatically give 50 % more memory bandwidth over 2 memory channels even if everything else remains the same. Great, isn't it?
Using DDR3-1333 memory, triple-channels would give you a memory bandwidth of 64 GB/s. That is a tremendous amount of memory bandwidth. But do we really, really need that kind of bandwidth? That is what we will be looking at today.


In these tests, we used the Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition running at 3.2 GHz. The L3 cache was set to run at 2.6 GHz. The DDR3 memory modules were set to run at 1066 MHz with timings of 7-7-7-20. Power Director7 was used to convert 3 minutes of a HD video (1080), while Cinebench was set to use all 8 threads.

Even with 50 % more memory bandwidth, Power Director 7 was just 9 seconds faster with 3 memory channels than it was with 2 memory channels. That's a completely negligible difference of 1 %.

Running with a single memory channel did result in a much longer render time. Power Director 7 took 84 seconds longer to complete the conversion. That's a difference of almost 11 %, compared to the conversion times with 2 or 3 memory channels.

So that some info about an i7 not the CPU in the wii u, and I imagine the i7 would kill the wii u CPU (my thoughts)

So back to your question. Would it load fast or yield better performance? Well the answer is yes.
A single lane highway can only let 1 vehicle pass at a time. Even at 60 mph
Two lane highway yields two vehicles at a time. However at 30mph you can expect the same data flow ( based on equal chips ). Another question is can each core pull from either lane ? If so a semi truck can be in lane 1 going to the CPU while a shitload of corvettes and Ferrari zip to the gpu.
Another thing is the memory controller that tells the info when and where and how fast to move. how good is that? Being on the same die I would bet its pretty fast. That being said there is no doubt in my mind that the wii u could pull from all 2 gigs if it wanted to, for gaming its up to Nintendo to allow that, which I also see happening with 512 extra ram for gaming to help with ports from 720/ps4.
Off topic*
I'm new but ill get in on the betting and predictions. 720 will have a full 4 gigs with ps4 having 2 full gigs for gaming with .5-1 gb for OS.
With wii u detailed why would they spend the money for an insanely geared product ? Slap an extra gig or 2 of ram 4 cores and a underclocked semi top of the line gpu for 400$ and make a profit.

PS sorry for typing I'm on my iPad and I hate typing with it. Hope this helps I am by no means an expert. But can say this I still use a socket 775 I could OC it but I don't q9550 with a 670 gtx 4 gigs of old school ram and I pull over 60fps maxed out in every game on my pc. Don't have crisis, but I still have to liquid cool it. So don't dismiss old technology!

The fastest i7 currently does quad-channel RAM, and if you run 2800mhz RAM and get the latency to stable below 8 then your ass would explode with bandwidth and speed. No console can match that kind of power without costing a lot of money lol.


O I'm agreeing with you 100%. Hence why I think it's silly that people think the new ps4/720 will be bleeding edge and cost effective. 



lilbroex on 13 October 2012
JEMC said:
lilbroex said:
JEMC said:
lilbroex said:

I notice that the Wii U has 4 RAM chips. That means that it is 512X4 as opposed to 1024X2 as I thought before.

If you look at any graphics card (with GDDR5 memory) or RAM sticks (with DDR3 mem.), you will notice that most of them use chips of 256 MB of capacity. Your asumption of 1 GB/chip was a bit... optimistic. And since we haven't seen the other side of the board we can't even be sure if WiiU uses 256 or 512 MB chips.

The Wii U has 2 GB or RAM. It has 4 RAM chips. What more needs to be seen?

I've bolded the answer to your question.

There are more things in the motherboard that we haven't seen, mostly because they probably are on the other side of the board. For example the 8 or 32 GB of flash storage.

Isn't that th echip up towards the front. Then again it may be in exhangeble slot which would mean that it isn't attached to the motherboard direclty.



drkohler on 13 October 2012
lilbroex said:

Isn't that th echip up towards the front. Then again it may be in exhangeble slot which would mean that it isn't attached to the motherboard direclty.

The big "chip" is obviously the chip carrier that contains CPU, GPU and eDram. Other than that, the picture is so lousy that nothing else can be deduced from it.  The two ram chip's shapes in the middle look like  rectangles, the shape of the two ram chips on the top look more like squares. Rectangles are DDR chips, squares are GDDR chips, so this picure isn't answering any questions. If the other side of the board contains the same ram chips, then it could be 1G of DDR3 ram and 1G of GDDR ram..

Make a (much) better picture of both sides of the PCB...



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JEMC on 13 October 2012
lilbroex said:

libroex said:

 

Isn't that th echip up towards the front. Then again it may be in exhangeble slot which would mean that it isn't attached to the motherboard direclty.

They are different kind of memory, but if the 4 chips that surround the MCM "only" have 512 MB, how can that one be 16 times bigger? It can't, so no, that's not the flach storage.

And no manufacturer will ship a console with something that isn't properly attached. It's too risky.



Please excuse my bad English.

Former gaming PC: i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Current gaming PC: R5-7600, 32GB RAM 6000MT/s (CL30) and a RX 9060XT 16GB

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.

lilbroex on 13 October 2012
JEMC said:
lilbroex said:

libroex said:

 

Isn't that th echip up towards the front. Then again it may be in exhangeble slot which would mean that it isn't attached to the motherboard direclty.

They are different kind of memory, but if the 4 chips that surround the MCM "only" have 512 MB, how can that one be 16 times bigger? It can't, so no, that's not the flach storage.

And no manufacturer will ship a console with something that isn't properly attached. It's too risky.


I said front. The front of the console is on the far left.



JEMC on 13 October 2012
lilbroex said:
JEMC said:
lilbroex said:

libroex said:

 

Isn't that th echip up towards the front. Then again it may be in exhangeble slot which would mean that it isn't attached to the motherboard direclty.

They are different kind of memory, but if the 4 chips that surround the MCM "only" have 512 MB, how can that one be 16 times bigger? It can't, so no, that's not the flach storage.

And no manufacturer will ship a console with something that isn't properly attached. It's too risky.

I said front. The front of the console is on the far left.

...

Thanks for stating what everybody already knew.

@drkohler: I also noticed the different shapes, but my optimistic side prefers to think that all the 4 chips are of the same kind of RAM, otherwise the 1GB for games and 1GB for the system won't change during its lifetime.



Please excuse my bad English.

Former gaming PC: i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Current gaming PC: R5-7600, 32GB RAM 6000MT/s (CL30) and a RX 9060XT 16GB

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.

drkohler on 13 October 2012
JEMC said

@drkohler: I also noticed the different shapes, but my optimistic side prefers to think that all the 4 chips are of the same kind of RAM, otherwise the 1GB for games and 1GB for the system won't change during its lifetime.

I think you misunderstand that. "Reserving memory for OS purposes" does of course not equate to having physically different ram chips. This is purely a software solution. Having 1G DDR and 1G GDDR ram does not seem to be unusual, either. You'd want much more ram speed for the GPU (particularly if you start with the multi-display idea right from the start). A good memory controller can live with slower DDR ram for general code any day.



Viper1 on 13 October 2012
lilbroex said:

I notice that the Wii U has 4 RAM chips. That means that it is 512X4 as opposed to 1024X2 as I thought before. This means that the consoles houses RAM equivelent to 4 PS3/360s.

Now, being it that it resereves 1GB that would mean that it reserves 512X2.

Now here are the big questions. Does it support loading RAM in parrallel and what type of RAM is it?

If it loads in parralel then how much of an improvement would that be to loading and managing data? Also, it will more than likley free up one of the RAM chips for gaming in the future so how much would it benefit from loading to 3 chips at once?

Parallel?  Are you talking about dual channel memory?   That's not dependant on the number of chips (number of DIMM's on a PC motherboard, yes, but not the number of chips itself).  However, modern IBM CPU's are dual channel CPU's.  So long as the motherboard itself can support dual channel, then yes it can be dual channel.  But consoles are designed such that the memory bandwith is rarely a bottleneck to begin with.

bananaking21 said:

more than enough ram? lets be honest here thats no way "more than enough" modern day PC's usually have 8 GB of ram (a good one for gaming that is) some go up to 16 GB's. so 1 GB honestly is a littel ram, much better than the PS3 and 360. but in term of RAM the WiiU doesnt pack much

1 GB for games on a console is actually enough.   Take a look at the exe file for Battlefield 3 running at 2560 x 1600 on ultra high textures...uses 1.8 GB.

A PC runs a whole lot of extra stuff and your games either never take advantage of all of it or simply don't need to.     Hell, most games are 32 bit applications and can't address more than 4 GB anyway. 

And let's not forget about texture streaming.   Given the Wii U's media drive gives 22.5 MB/s bandwidth, it can easily stream enough textures to never worry about taxing the system RAM.

lilbroex said:

I'm not talking about the amount so much as the design. The Wii U has multiple RAM chips that are likely faster than the ones in the PS3 and 360 individually.

Say you have one chip that can transfer data at a rate of 25 MB/s(megabytes per second). If you load to two of those chips at once it would raise that to 50 MB/s on top of having less stress on the hardware as you could divide up the work. You could also load data onto one chip while receiving from the other thus prevents the system from being limited by the bandwith of the RAM.

I'm asking how much of a benefit this will be to the games.

All they need to do is make sure the data bandwidth is high enough.   Doesn't matter if it's single channel or 8 channel.  If have too much memory bandwidth, then it's going to waste.   Consoles being closed systems with locked hardware tend ot balance that bandwidth exactly where they need it.



The rEVOLution is not being televised