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Forums - Nintendo - Wii U CPU + GPU clock speeds increased? Is it even possible?

JEMC on 10 May 2013
megaman79 said:

Remember that guy that posted a thread about this months ago? He said that he knew Nintendo intentionally underpowered the console for 3rd parties, and would only use maximum power for its 1st party titles.

Nobody believed such a ridiculous story at the time. hmm.....

As curl-6 has said it was a restriction to the amount of memory they could use, not the speed of the CPU/GPU. And it was DanneSandin.

Btw, congrats for your 6000th post.



Please excuse my bad English.

Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

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

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hsrob on 10 May 2013

First question. Is it now drawing 45W of power versus the ~35W it was using initially? Surely that can't be too hard for someone to figure out.



Porcupine_I on 10 May 2013

this just confirms my anonymous sources rumor that they are working on a liquid nitrogen based cooling add on that will double the Wii U's performance



“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”

- George Orwell, ‘1984’

Nem on 10 May 2013
fillet said:
Nem said:
fillet said:
KHlover said:
Why shouldn't it be? The PSP also did this.


PSP was underclocked by default for power reasons.

That is to say it was running under specification so clock speeds weren't "increased" they were just set as high as they should have been in the first place.

Don't know if that's the case with the Wii-U, incredibly unlikely, or unbelieveable (genuinely, not in the "amazing unbelivable" way.)

Going from circa 1.5Ghz to 3.xx Ghz is just asking a bit much to take seriously that Nintendo would have released the console at only 1.5Ghz considering the moaning the low CPU speed has caused and being responsible for the frame rate issues in the current ports.

There's no reason for the Wii-U to have been underclocked like there was with the PSP, power isn't an issue obviously as it doesn't run on batteries.

 

Yes there was. Because of the nuclear disaster in Japan, there are very pressing concerns about energy consumption in Japan.

I am sure nintendo was aware of this and tried to avoid any bad situations with the media.

 

Though i have to admit, this is a master move by Nintendo if its true. They should have revealed it sooner though.

That's up there in the old UFO conspiracy theories for believeability.

...edit...unless you're joking, hope so!!!!!???


I think you're not showing tact here. It has been said that it was, unfortunely i dont recall where i read it.

It is a very serious business i dont understand why you're treating it like its nothing. It is a big deal in Japan because they want to shut down the nuclear plants. There has been a huge debate about it in the country. Its only obvious a japanese company would take that into its marketing analysis.

What would you think would happen if there was a nuclear meltdown near your town. How would people be feeling about the need of nuclear power and how to diminish that need. Nintendo is branded as a family friendly company. They cant be involved in such scandals, it would severely damage their image and business.

And am i saying thats why they hid the true speed of the clock? No. But it was a very serious concern when designing the system for the Japanese market.



Zero999 on 10 May 2013
JEMC said:

The rumored new speed for the CPU is unbelievable. Really. No one can believe that they almost tripled its speed with no serious consequences.

But a more modest increase could be possible. Heck, Nintendo said that the WiiU was designed to use about 45W when playing yet when it was launched and the media tryed it, they recorded a consumption of "only" 35W.

is it that uncommon for a new console not being pushed to it's limits? also, i think 75W is wii u limit.

abot the cpu/gpu clock increse, i have no idea if it can be done or not but i read it wouldn't cause any consequence if the cooling and rest of the system were designed with that in mind to begin with. if true it would be kind of a surprise to everyone since increasing power was only possible with add ons.



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JEMC on 10 May 2013
Zero999 said:
JEMC said:

The rumored new speed for the CPU is unbelievable. Really. No one can believe that they almost tripled its speed with no serious consequences.

But a more modest increase could be possible. Heck, Nintendo said that the WiiU was designed to use about 45W when playing yet when it was launched and the media tryed it, they recorded a consumption of "only" 35W.

is it that uncommon for a new console not being pushed to it's limits? also, i think 75W is wii u limit.

abot the cpu/gpu clock increse, i have no idea if it can be done or not but i read it wouldn't cause any consequence if the cooling and rest of the system were designed with that in mind to begin with. if true it would be kind of a surprise to everyone since increasing power was only possible with add ons.

No, that's the rated wattage for the power brick.

Of those 72 or 75W you have to substract what it is lost due to the efficiency of the power brick (most of the new PC Power supplies are about 85% of efficiency or higher), then there is the overhead that must be left for safety reasons (you don't really want it to be always at 100% of its capacity) and other things that also make you lose some W.



Please excuse my bad English.

Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

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

BlkPaladin on 10 May 2013
hsrob said:
First question. Is it now drawing 45W of power versus the ~35W it was using initially? Surely that can't be too hard for someone to figure out.


All it takes is a Watt Meter and a bit of math and then factoring out the other devices drain (disc drive, etc).



Mr Khan on 10 May 2013

As previously stated, there is precedent with the PSP, although that would mean Nintendo was deliberately restraining the CPU/GPU speeds for some reason. We *do* know that they're probably tying up more RAM than they need to (my guess is they could easily let another 256 MB free for games, especially since they did just do an upgrade to boost OS efficiency)



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

fillet on 10 May 2013
JEMC said:
fillet said:
JEMC said:
Now that I think of it, if they did increase the speeds then the sensible thing would have been to also increase the speed of the fan to keep temps down so...

Have any WiiU owners noticed that their console does more noise?


No, that's ridiculous.

If the CPU speed was increased it simply means that it was underclocked to begin with and wouldn't need additional cooling, sure the heat would increase but then the cooling would already have been sufficient to begin with.

Also to put further humiliation on this rumour, recently marcan of Wii-U hacking fame has  said there is nothing new and interesting in the Wii-U, he was talking from architecutre point of view to be clear, but if this 3Ghz+ increase on the CPU was possible he'd already know about it.

Nintendo has always been, to put it nicely, obsessed with making consoles that aren't obtrusive, that go unnoticed.

It wouldn't be hard to believe that they went with a system that runs a bit hotter but it's quiet. And if they have increased the speeds they they would have been forced to increase the speed of their fan to keep temps under control.

Mind you, I'm only saying that it is possible.

It's possible, but it's not likely. Lots of things are possible, best to look at what's most likely otherwise we'd never finish discussing anything ever :)



fillet on 10 May 2013
BlkPaladin said:
hsrob said:
First question. Is it now drawing 45W of power versus the ~35W it was using initially? Surely that can't be too hard for someone to figure out.


All it takes is a Watt Meter and a bit of math and then factoring out the other devices drain (disc drive, etc).


35W -> 45W would mean nowhere near an increase of 1.5Ghz-3Ghz+ on the CPU.

Google some power draw stats on desktop CPUs, doesn't add up.