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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - NeoGAF: Wii U GPU 160 ALUs, 8 TMUs and 8 ROPs

Pemalite on 09 November 2013
forethought14 said:

Well, if Latte is 40nm, and if its total die size is 156.21mm2 (those measurements are pretty accurate with two decimal places), and we know it uses AMD Radeon technology, and the 40nm cards seem to average around 6 - 6.25 million transistors per squared millimeter, then we could use simple arithmetic, and easily calculate the transistor count:

156.21 millimeter squared x 6,000,000 (million transistors / millimeter squared) = minimum 937,260,000 transistors for all of the Latte die (including the eDRAM). eDRAM is roughly 220 million transistors for 32MB 40nm Renesas eDRAM, so GPU logic for Latte is:

937 million (total die) - 220 million (eDRAM) = 717,260,000 (estimate) minimum transistors for pure GPU logic. "Logic" includes everything like Shaders, Texture mapping units, GPRs, Tessellator, etc.

There is no point calculating it.
You could be off by 20-30% easily because you can pack transisters in more densely on a mature process verses one that isn't, when both are compared at the same fabrication process.

You can also use transisters with better power characteristics if you are targeting a low clockrate too, which can save a ton of power by allowing you to be aggressive with low voltages and minimising leakage.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

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forethought14 on 09 November 2013
Pemalite said:
forethought14 said:

Well, if Latte is 40nm, and if its total die size is 156.21mm2 (those measurements are pretty accurate with two decimal places), and we know it uses AMD Radeon technology, and the 40nm cards seem to average around 6 - 6.25 million transistors per squared millimeter, then we could use simple arithmetic, and easily calculate the transistor count:

156.21 millimeter squared x 6,000,000 (million transistors / millimeter squared) = minimum 937,260,000 transistors for all of the Latte die (including the eDRAM). eDRAM is roughly 220 million transistors for 32MB 40nm Renesas eDRAM, so GPU logic for Latte is:

937 million (total die) - 220 million (eDRAM) = 717,260,000 (estimate) minimum transistors for pure GPU logic. "Logic" includes everything like Shaders, Texture mapping units, GPRs, Tessellator, etc.

There is no point calculating it.
You could be off by 20-30% easily because you can pack transisters in more densely on a mature process verses one that isn't, when both are compared at the same fabrication process.

You can also use transisters with better power characteristics if you are targeting a low clockrate too, which can save a ton of power by allowing you to be aggressive with low voltages and minimising leakage.

I did happen to say it was an "estimate" I'm sure it's possible that I'm inaccurate +/- by several tens of millions. Though, the point was to get the idea across that it had a very large amount of transistors for a conventional 40nm 160 shader part (most of them are around 300 million), even more than the Radeon GPUs that released in 2012 with 160 shaders (those likely share the similar mature 40nm processes as Latte, the lower-end 7000 series GPUs that used 40nm and with VLIW core architecture). Though, I'm pretty sure that the million transistors per mm2 aren't going to be significantly more different considering how no 40nm GPU had transistors per mm2 substantially off what I averaged (though I've found mainly 6.01 +/- 0.1 averages, I've heard mention of numbers as high as 6.25, so I included that in). Unless Latte used certain transistors that no other commercial GPU has used before....



spurgeonnintendoryan on 09 November 2013
ethomaz said:

morenoingrato said:

You just need to see the creator of the thread to know the answer.

You are saying I'm donwplaying a console already released, with a lot of games and the everybody knows it is weaker than the others two consoles?

lol


What do you mean by other two consoles? 360 and PS3 or X1 and PS4?



forethought14 on 09 November 2013
spurgeonnintendoryan said:


What do you mean by other two consoles? 360 and PS3 or X1 and PS4?

I'm pretty sure he means PS4/X1, only a fool would believe Wii U is less powerful. 



Naum on 09 November 2013

So the conclusion is that Nintendo sure do know how to optimize their consoles

Thank God I only care about games and not specs

You should too, I promise you will enjoy games much more that way



If it isn't turnbased it isn't worth playing   (mostly)

And shepherds we shall be,

For Thee, my Lord, for Thee. Power hath descended forth from Thy hand, That our feet may swiftly carry out Thy command. So we shall flow a river forth to Thee And teeming with souls shall it ever be. In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritūs Sancti. -----The Boondock Saints

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zippy on 09 November 2013

Games games games and games thats what matters.



Pemalite on 09 November 2013
Naum said:
So the conclusion is that Nintendo sure do know how to optimize their consoles

Thank God I only care about games and not specs

You should too, I promise you will enjoy games much more that way


There is room to care about both.
I'm a hardware enthusiast who likes to game, probably a good thing that I'm part of the PC Gaming Master Race so I get the best of both worlds. :)



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

joora on 09 November 2013

All this talk about technology is actually starting to bother me.

I' sure that implicating that better technology is the main ingredient behind a better looking game is a bit insulting to a game artist. A great game is rarely bound by technology restrains, because those restrains were taken into consideration before development. A great game artist will immerse the player so deeply into the game, that the number of pixels or polygons will stop matter. Console gaming community has indeed become worse than digital photography one... and that is worrying

As a (first and foremost) PC gamer I find all this "pissing contest" quite amusing. And sad. Very sad. Ranking gaming systems primarily by their technical abilities is the worst thing a "gamer" can make. I can easily remember piles of moving squares that were more fun and immersive than many of todays HD "materpeices". Any gamer that dissmises a game solely on whether it's "only" 720p or looks "too childlish" should stop calling himself a gamer. Not to mention that it's very disrespectful to the people that put a good part of their lives into making it.

Put your prejudices aside and open your mind to new experiences. You might be surprised what you find.



.

eyeofcore on 09 November 2013
fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:
fatslob-:O said:
MohammadBadir said:
fatslob-:O said:

I'm glad some of us came to a consensus that a system can do more with less.

it's doing more with more.

@Bold I don't know about that.

I can be pretty sure that it's achieving more with less. 

Depends what we're saying it has less of. It's got less CPU clock speed, less electricity consumption, and possibly less FLOPS, but the original Xbox had less FLOPS than the PS2 and look how that turned out.

On the other hand it has more RAM, more eDRAM, newer GPU features, more CPU cache, more instruction per cycle.

@Bold The IPC is worse than bulldozer no offence. 

I agree with everthing else but the reason why the xbox won has to do with it having an insane fillrate such as pixel and texture. 

You guys should be depending on it's newer architecture, not it's raw power!

 

It is not a disaster for what it is... Espresso matches in GFLOPS;

i5 480M Core's;2/Thread's;4/Litography;32nm/Clock;2.66-2.9Ghz/Cache;3MB/Die Size;81mm^2/Transistor's;328 million/TDP; 35 watts/GFLOPS: 15

Pentium E5800 Core's;2/Litography;45nm/Clock;3.2Ghz/Cache;2MB/Die Size;82mm^2/Transistor's; 228 million/TDP; 65 watts/GFLOPS; 15

Are both of these from above disasters for what they are compared to Espresso that has 3 core's, produced at litography of 45nm, clocked at 1.243Ghz, has 3MB of L3 Cache, die size of just 27.7mm^2 with 60 million transistor's while TDP is like 5--8 watts?!

You deny the fact that it is not a disaster for what it is, for the architecture it is for performance per mm^2 it has at 45nm litography.

We are talking about an ancient architecture from end of 1990is... And from what I can see... It does a heck of a job for what it is...

If Wii U's GPU was 160:8:8 then why is that large? It should be smaller, it should be like 100mm^2 not 146-147mm^2...

This is how GTA V would perform on PC with identical GFLOPS in CPU and supposed 160:8:8 GPU and closest to that is Radeon HD 6450;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLadMpbzF84



Wyrdness on 09 November 2013
fatslob-:O said:

35 watts isn't speculation! It's a proven fact by anandtech. I'm not looking for credibility per se but rather I'm looking for consistency. Those specs seem to match the power consumption of the device at hand. If you knew a thing about chip fabrication and their thermal designs the conclusion would be very easy to come towards. Rather than just call everything speculation you have to make a fine line between that and a hypothesis. I'm sure viktorBBK and pemalite would come to a similar hypothesis and they know a damn lot about semiconductor fabrication.


Yeah yeah man, credibility is everything at this point because all the whooha GAF and you lot are spouting it's all speculation, knowing the power consumption oesn't really back up anything you or your preferred speculator has said as I recall months back they were saying it matched something else, then another thing and quite frankly I don't care about you going on about chips and all that rubbish it's still speculation, you have no concrete evidence behind it all. The whole more with less stance comes across as a get out of jail card tbh.