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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Wii U hacked and CPU clock speed revealed, apparently.

dahuman on 29 November 2012
snowdog said:
gigantor21 said:
If that's the case, it's no wonder they didn't want to talk about it. XD

Seriously, though, that's ridiculous.

Actually it's pretty good if true. The Broadway in the Wii is clocked at around 750MHz if I remember correctly and beats the Xenon, the CPU in the 360, at general processing tasks. The only thing it's not too hot at is floating point work, but then that's what the GPU is for. Three Broadways duct-taped together is not a bad thing by any means, and most certainly isn't ridiculous.

rumor is 739



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dahuman on 29 November 2012
Spazzy_D said:
SxyxS said:
I guess the numbers are wrong.
1.25gh is even for the usual nintendo low tech to pathetic.

You can manufacture the same cpu running 1.5-2.0 for almost the same money,but than you can better compete with the soon coming ps460.Why taking the risk to lose the remaining core gamers if you can save only a few pennies?-or nintendo think that they can keep the wii u running only with mario ,dance party and mario kart .this may work for 2-3years but soon they will be in same trouble like they were in the past 2years with the wii software sales.


The CPU speed isn't about money though.... I don't think so anyway.  It seems to me that the Wii U is getting stuck with a subpar CPU for two reason, 1 is backwards compatability and the other is because Nintendo really wanted to make the Wii U super small.

I'm not liking that idea.... it's very Japan-centric, which makes sense as Nintendo is a Japanese company and the only region they seem to really fight for is Japan.  It's just a shame that the system might have a real bottle neck only because they wanted to make it run less hot in that little box and consume less power; it also makes a slim model down the road less attractive to consumers. 

If they win the Asian market, they pretty much can secure large sums of profit, this is a corporation names Nintendo and if nothing else, they'll always be profitable in that regard, let's not forget that.



dahuman on 29 November 2012
Gilgamesh said:

Which is better my laptop or the WiiU?

 i5-2430M 2.4 GHz

3 MB Intel Smart Cache

6GB DD3

750GB SATA HDD

AMD Radeon HD 6470M 1 GB DDR3 Graphics w/up to 3813 MB video memory


your GPU is crappy enough that I'd say the Wii U is better for games actually.



dahuman on 29 November 2012
keroncoward said:
UncleScrooge said:
1) Is this actually a trustworthy source? You know, I could post random numbers on the web too...

2) If these numbers are real this must be a pretty modern architecture considering developers were able to make PS360 games run on the console in such a short period of time.

3) I'm totally looking forward to the response of the "less ghz!" people when the other consoles are revealed... will we get flooded by "it's only a 3ghz quad core CPU, so it's only 25% more powerful than PS3" comments?


It is a somewhat trustworthy source but dont jump to conclusions like: Higher number = better performance.


The thing we have to look at is the die size though, after tech sites opened up the MCM, we already knew the CPU wouldn't be the fastest, even if much more efficient. It'd require fine tuning instead of working off raw power, much like a Japanese car. -_^b



the2real4mafol on 29 November 2012

Thats pretty slow ain't it? We have phones and tablets that are faster than that now!



Xbox One, PS4 and Switch (+ Many Retro Consoles)

'When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the people's stick'- Mikhail Bakunin

Prediction: Switch will sell better than Wii U Lifetime Sales by Jan 1st 2018

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dahuman on 29 November 2012
Kynes said:
gigantor21 said:
snowdog said:
Kynes said:
snowdog said:
gigantor21 said:
If that's the case, it's no wonder they didn't want to talk about it. XD

Seriously, though, that's ridiculous.

Actually it's pretty good if true. The Broadway in the Wii is clocked at around 750MHz if I remember correctly and beats the Xenon, the CPU in the 360, at general processing tasks. The only thing it's not too hot at is floating point work, but then that's what the GPU is for. Three Broadways duct-taped together is not a bad thing by any means, and most certainly isn't ridiculous.


Can you provide more info about this? A link would be very appreciated.

It was just something that someone on Gaf pointed out. The thing with the Xenon and the Cell is that they're In-Order processors and that they have to handle a great deal more than the Broadway such as IO and sound. And every process has to be run in the order that they come in. If there's a process that needs doing is waiting for conditions to be met the CPU remains idle until the conditions are right.

With the Broadway (and the Gecko in the Gamecube and now the Expresso in the Wii U) the Wii has dedicated silicon to handle sound called a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and the CPU is an Out-Of-Order execution processor. If there's a process is waiting for conditions to be met the CPU switches to other processes that can be worked on until the condition is met, meaning you get less idle cycles. An OOOE CPU is more efficient.

And having a DSP is a major advantage, developers have to have at least 1 thread out of 6 for the 360 and 1 SPE out of 7 for the PS3 reserved exclusively to handle sound. For sound intensive games such as racing games developers often have two threads handling sound - that's a third of the 360's processing power. :Oo

It basically beats the 360 at general processing due to a combination of it being more efficient thanks to OOOE and having dedicated silicon to handle sound, it basically has less work to do and the work it does do is more efficient.

Huh. I didn't know the processors were built THAT differently. Thanks for the info, man.

So then let me ask you: do you think that it will be efficient enough to really peel away from current gen performance?


It's not exactly as snowdog says. It's true that Broadway is an OOE chip, but that alone can't make the difference of one core at 729 MHZ to three cores with two threads each, at 3.2 GHz. You can make a case with Expresso and the X360 CPU, but I still believe X360 is faster at the CPU level due to having much more bruteforce. The sound DSP helps, but sound proccesing doesn't consume all that much cpu cycles on a modern proccesor. That's why dedicated sound chips died on the mainstream pc level more than 10 years ago.

dedicated sound chips still exist... they are just usually on the motherboard now, and most of them sound like shit, it's right now either you go completely digital with toslink on the most common realtek chipset, or get one of the better HT Omega cards for some real good sound.



superchunk on 29 November 2012

These specs are what has been in my comparison thread already, with the exception of a possible 1.2GHz processor. I was expecting closer to 3.... like maybe 2.5. However, we have known it was a "enhanced" 3-core Wii CPU for awhile now and the 550MHz GPU is new, but its the type of GPU I still want to know.

It is more interesting that its been hacked already. This is crazy and I wonder what Nintendo will do. I mean it seems like part of the Wii BC was due to Wii being so heavily hacked. I hope this doesn't mean it gets overly locked down.

I'll update my thread now as this certainly fits the latest rumors and makes sense.



Kynes on 29 November 2012
dahuman said:
Kynes said:
...


It's not exactly as snowdog says. It's true that Broadway is an OOE chip, but that alone can't make the difference of one core at 729 MHZ to three cores with two threads each, at 3.2 GHz. You can make a case with Expresso and the X360 CPU, but I still believe X360 is faster at the CPU level due to having much more bruteforce. The sound DSP helps, but sound proccesing doesn't consume all that much cpu cycles on a modern proccesor. That's why dedicated sound chips died on the mainstream pc level more than 10 years ago.

dedicated sound chips still exist... they are just usually on the motherboard now, and most of them sound like shit, it's right now either you go completely digital with toslink on the most common realtek chipset, or get one of the better HT Omega cards for some real good sound.

Most of them are software based, not hardware based. They use the CPU as the number cruncher.



dahuman on 29 November 2012
the2real4mafol said:
Thats pretty slow ain't it? We have phones and tablets that are faster than that now!


ARM is not exactly faster than Power PC in certain regardes, the goal of ARM is more on power efficiency.



the2real4mafol on 29 November 2012
dahuman said:
the2real4mafol said:
Thats pretty slow ain't it? We have phones and tablets that are faster than that now!


ARM is not exactly faster than Power PC in certain regardes, the goal of ARM is more on power efficiency.

If it was a portable system that would be a good enough reason, but it's constantly plugged into the mains, so why would it have to be super energy efficient?



Xbox One, PS4 and Switch (+ Many Retro Consoles)

'When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the people's stick'- Mikhail Bakunin

Prediction: Switch will sell better than Wii U Lifetime Sales by Jan 1st 2018