Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have similar CPUs that have differences in design that can not be overcome without recoding and optimizations. Game code of Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 will not take advantage of out-of-order execution, larger caches, extremely accurate/short pipeline, etc... without game code being chanded, adapted and modified to take these advantages otherwise Wii U will choke on highly inefficjent code that is efficient in a totally different enviroment/architecture.

Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 use customized IBMs CPUs and Wii U uses IBMs CPU also, are they same CPUs? NO.

Anyway... SIMD in Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 is slower than Scalar in Wii U and has faster caches.

Snowdog... WII U has SMT otherwise multithreading would have been impossible.

Cell had 1 PPC and 6 SPEs to optimize for so it's not a good counter argument.

I've explained why Wii U's CPU with it's shorter pipes, bigger caches, out-of-order exec (which trump the 360 equivalents) will run old PPC code well.  (Sure they will not run Cell SPE, or Intel or MIPS code well )

Why don't you give some actual reasons why, as PPC cores they are not yet fully utilized?  What is not utilized yet?

That's more or less the opposite of what ICStat posted above. He said:

"Yes, I know that.  Do you know what it means?

Shorter pipelines = less branch mis-predict cost, automatically.
Larger caches = less code & data eviction problems, automatically.
Out-of-order = higher IPC, automatically.

Did I mention "automatically" enough?  It means it's not secret sauce, or something you have to optimize for.  It automatically runs PS3/360 code more efficiently.  Games are already benefiting from that.

As for the audio chip - I would hope that it's use is just part of the SDK and so games are already using that.
As for GPGPU - Sure this is something that developers could use to offload some CPU work, but this is a different topic from untapped potential of the CPU."

According to him, the modernisations on the WiiU CPU should actually help sloppy code run faster.

Scoobes... I didnt said anything opposite, read it again...

Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 code will not magically/automatically use all advantages that Wii Us CPU.

Yep, all the features are there to get higher IPC on the same code.

It's a "big" vs "small" core difference.

• Wii U, "big" core = out-of-order exec, large cache, more ALUs, best branch prediction.
• X360, "small" core = in-order exec, small cache, fewer ALUs, worse branch prediction.

When moving code optimized for "big" onto "small" cores it makes sense you need to optimize more.  You need to optimize for the small cache, schedule code better to avoid stalls, and reduce branch mis-predicts.

When moving code optimized for "small" onto "big" cores, well the same doesn't apply.  "big" code runs good, and "small" code runs even better.

The main thing I think is troubling Wii U is SIMD throughput.  The Wii U cores may have more ALUs, but not more SIMD units.

If 360 cores have 1 SIMD @ 3.2GHz, and Wii U cores have 1 SIMD @ 1.25GHz well you can see a big problem there, if the code was well optimized to use SIMD it could run much slower on Wii U.

Expresso doesn't have SMT as far as I'm aware. It doesn't need it because the pipeline is so small. I am of course talking about SMT for each core. Having SMT would actually slow the chip down. You can run 3 threads, one for each core.

Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have Altivec which is superior to primitive SIMD of Wii U that dates all the way back to 2000/2001 so Wii U is in worser situatioN and that is why ports have issues. It is not bdcause CPU is weak, not at all. It does not perform well in SIMD while in Scaral it should easily excel Xbox 360/PlayStation 3s SIMD while about 5 or 6 years ago SIMD code became faster than Scalar. Since Xbox 360 was releasedin 2005 and PlayStation 3 in 2006 thus we know its SIMD wont be faster than Scalar.

Actually Cell only has 5 SPEs to use because the 6th SPE has to be reserved for sound, same as Xenon only has 5 threads for the same reason. You won't get a game licenced without it.

For games that have thousands of sounds playing at once, such as racing games, some developers use 2 x SPEs and an entire core for sound.

You can have graphical bugs all over the place and people will ignore it but a sound problem is really jarring. You won't have a game passing TRCs/TCRs without the hardware restrictions above and with any sort of sound issues.

Espresso has SMT and multi-threading/core would be hard without it and scalar/superscalar code benefits greatly from SMT.

Got a link for that..?