If this is yet another quirky Nintendo chip like the Gamecube/Wii GPUs, which were dramatically different to their rivals and required specialized coding to get the most out of them, then I fear that, as with the Wii, third party games mostly won't bother to use these specialized capabilities. With the Wii this barrier was so severe that nobody ever really pushed the system's GPU to its limit.

They would have been better off going with a more standard design.

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

It means the Wii U could produce up to 2 brazilian rams. And THAT is a lot of freaking rams.

The three probale theories about the sharder part...

Like R700's VLIW5: 160 shaders @ 176GFLOPs
Like Trinity's VLIW4: 256 shaders @ 282GFLOPs
Custom VLIW5: 320 shaders @ 352GFLOPs

Nope, the 70W were the rated figure for the power brick.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6465/nintendo-wii-u-teardown

Wii U Menu (No Disc in Drive) : 31.2W
Wii U Menu (Disc in Drive) : 32.8W
Super Mario U : 33.0W
Netflix Playback : 28.5W

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-wii-u-is-the-green-console

Front-End : 32w
FIFA 13 Demo : 32w
Netflix HD : 29w

It seems like the WiiU is always at 100% load, which is a bit odd :-/

I actually wonder if Nintendo hasn't done something to hold the power usage down at this point in time. As I understand it, Nintendo themselves said the system would use 45 W at peak.

http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/41850/wii-u-specs-update-memory-and-storage-space-revealed/

So why are they all using about 33 W? Did Nintendo just do extra efficiency modifications in the last few months? Or are the launch titles specifically not using all of the available power? Or is it just that they haven't tested the appropriate games?

I don't know.

Let's assume a case where the game/console runs at 35W. With a power brick with an efficiency of 70% that means that it draws 50W from the wall, add another 20% left for safety (because efficiency goes down with time, etc.) and you end with 60W. With the power brick being 70W, where are the other 10W?

Who knows, maybe they'll do what happened with the PSP or the 3DS and launch a firmware that increases the speeds of the CPU or the GPU (or maybe both).

Digital Foundry article...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-wii-u-graphics-power-finally-revealed

320:16:8 - Similar to HD 4650/4670.

The best part "crucial information simply wasn't available in Nintendo's papers, with developers essentially left to their own devices to figure out the performance level of the hardware."

Now we know why third-party don't like Nintendo lol. 

I'm fairly certain that Nintendo wouldn't have been describing power draw from the wall, specifically because of that efficiency issue - if they were to say "the system draws 60 W from the wall", then after a year, it would draw more, and their claim would no longer be accurate. But the power draw from the system is easily measured.

The other issue is that Nintendo said it could require up to 75 W, but would typically use only 45 W. Based on 70% efficiency, 45 W becomes only 31.5 W, which is below the number we've seen for most games. It's more likely that the 45 W number is the system power draw, not the total power draw at the wall, in my opinion. But then, I'm no expert.

@marcan42 (the guy that reveled the GPU clock)

- The NeoGAF folks could've just asked me and I would've told them about the 32MB MEM1 and 2MB MEM0/EFB without die shots :P

- 32MB 1T-SRAM MEM1, 2MB 1T-SRAM MEM0/EFB, 1MB SRAM ETB. I bet the I/O block with the tank is SATA and the 7x next to it USB.

- I still think the entire Wii GX is in there too. It's not a ridiculous amount of die area - about 2x the size of the EFB 1T block.

https://twitter.com/marcan42 

first... no need to put a 9 mega pixel image in the OP...

good jod AMD...