There are only 4 sticks and it's 256M? So 1 GB? Doesn't the Wii U have 2 GB's?

Looks to me like this is the OS RAM, not the game RAM. Nintendo would be foolish incorporating 2 GB's of slow DDR3 RAM for the entire system. OS doesn't need superfast RAM so it would make sense if they used slow but very cheap RAM for that.

Without knowing more about the eDRAM, this bit of information is moot.



Think of how Intel CPU's are clocked slower than AMD CPU's yet are still more powerful. You can't judge based on just 1 number. You really need to see the overall design and all the numbers to truly understand how powerful a system is.

to steal form drkohler 

"Dude, why do write so much if you don't understand it?

256M*16 means 256MBit * 16bit wide ram, so one chip has 512 MByte data. Four chips = 2 GByte, what is so difficult?

However, it is surprising they went with a single Dram controller (usually 64bit wide in every CPU/GPU). That is al ot of bandwidth lost for a unified design."

Don't know much about tech, but shouldn't we wait for the overall structure of the system before making judge?

Yeah, I read passed the 4Gbit part. 4Gbit equals 512 MB so that makes 2 GB total...

This is really dissapointing. I doubt even 32 MB of EDRAM will be enough to negate the penalty of this very slow memory.

I really don't understand this. 2 GB's of 1600 MHz DDR3 costs about 10 bucks... I understand Nintendo trying to keep costs low but this is ridiculous.

They said they listened to developers when designing the Wii U. I doubt the dev's told them to get memory that's slow as fuck.

Can somebody please break this down into non-tech lingo for plebians like me?
Is it looking like the gap between Wii U and the other next gen consoles is going to be irreconcilably big?

We really shouldn't be judging the Wii U's unofficial RAM speed until after its first Christmas.

Isn't it a bit early to be disarming the Wii U? We don't even have a single week of hardware sales yet... I think the debate on whether the Wii U is more powerful than the PS360 is somewhat spent by now.

It basically means that the WiiU has a $4 memory system that was outdated in 2006. Give the nextgen consoles 4/8G of 128bit memory (256bit probably would be a stretch in a console), and developers will have a very hard time matching the WiiU performance to that. Does not mean that WiiU ports will look significantly worse than the nextgen versions, but it becomes more likely, though.

the memory wont be a major issue unless this is what the video card is using ... then id be like what the hell big N, but i think the video card uses edram on the gpu die.... general that means a very small amount , but also very very fast... for stuffing the cpu 1600 ddr will be fine, unless the gpu has to dip to it .... the bus size is a bigger issue should have been wider