Nano Assault developer Shin’en Multimedia has given a few details of the Wii U’s hardware architecture, praising Nintendo’s solutions to a common problem.

Shin’en’s Manfred Linzner told Not Enough Shaders that the team was “amazed” by “how much code” the hardware could handle without slowdowns, even before optimisation.

“The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U,” he said.

“They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed. For instance, with only some tiny changes we were able to optimize certain heavy load parts of the rendering pipeline to six times the original speed, and that was even without using any of the extra cores.

The developer said bottleneck apply to any hardware but Nintendo’s decisions as regards cache layout, ram latency and ram size prove an effective solution.

“Also Nintendo took care that other components like the Wii U GamePad screen streaming, or the built-in camera don’t put a burden on the CPU or GPU,” he added.

Linzner noted that the Wii U already has plenty of power, but said that it also has a lot of potential for optimising, meaning that in a few years time when developers really start exploring the console’s limits, we ought to see some impressive performance.

Shin’en’s next release is Nano Assault Neo, which is expected during the Wii U’s launch window.

http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/05/wii-u-avoids-ram-bottleneck-says-nano-assault-dev/

Old article but good for the moment based on what everyone is worrying on.

NineTails, don't you know that arm chair game developers are infinitely wiser than actual game developers?

They must be lying. Because arm chair game developers say it has the bandwidth of a toaster and that it can't even toast your bread on both sides.

But can it toast my poptart?

Nope.  Not enough Jiggahertz on the 2 nm disc drive.

I was thinking about that very topic with the Gamecube. Nintendo like to balance out it architecture to minimize bottlenecks. I think it was Eggbert (Factor 5) who likened the how Nintendo built the GC to a Zen garden, noting that even though it wasn't the most powerful console it had the most room to optimize because of the consideration they put toward reducing bottle necks.

A guy I went to highschool with put a cheese sandwhich in a computer at the highschool and the computer melted the cheese and fried the motherboard.  The bread got slightly toasted and this computer was probably made in 2000 or so and had a rather large tower by today's standards.  With the Wii U being so compact I think a poptart should toast just fine.  You may want to take the console apart and remove the heat sinks if the poptart isn't as toated as you would like.  If that still doesn't work then rip out the fans and wrap the console in a towel.  That should provide enough heat and you won't have to mess up your toaster.  Those things are a pain to clean. 

latency =/= bandwidth, but low latency is always a very very good thing. In PC terms, 1600 MHz RAM @CAS6 would rape 2000MHz RAM @CAS9. It's how many times you can access that memory vs how much you can push at once basically.

I was thinking of this article after reading all those wiiu is less powerful than a toaster!