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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Clearing up a major misconception about PowerPC

fatslob-:O on 29 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:

The PPW of the Xeons isn't much higher than the POWER8 chips though, the 250 Watt TDP is for the top of the line chip. That thing runs 12 cores at 5Ghz and 96 instruction sets.

Except the WII U is not based off the POWER8 cores ...



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fatslob-:O on 29 January 2015
Tachikoma said:
but as its an old powerpc chip is in infact dated powerpc architecture..
just as an older pentium or amd chip is dated x86 architecture, because the chips lack modern features such as sse3/3.1/4 etc.

This too ...



WolfpackN64 on 29 January 2015
fatslob-:O said:
WolfpackN64 said:

The PPW of the Xeons isn't much higher than the POWER8 chips though, the 250 Watt TDP is for the top of the line chip. That thing runs 12 cores at 5Ghz and 96 instruction sets.

Except the WII U is not based off the POWER8 cores ...

The point I'm trying to make is that PowerPC in itself is not outdated, as sometimes claimed, but the Wii U's CPU in a way is.



fatslob-:O on 29 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:

The point I'm trying to make is that PowerPC in itself is not outdated, as sometimes claimed, but the Wii U's CPU in a way is.

Which is what they meant ... 



WolfpackN64 on 29 January 2015
fatslob-:O said:
WolfpackN64 said:

The point I'm trying to make is that PowerPC in itself is not outdated, as sometimes claimed, but the Wii U's CPU in a way is.

Which is what they meant ... 


Trust me, when I see "the oudated PowerPC", it's so general a lot of people think the architecture itself is too old.



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teigaga on 29 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:
fatslob-:O said:

Which is what they meant ... 


Trust me, when I see "the oudated PowerPC", it's so general a lot of people think the architecture itself is too old.

Its less cost efficient in this day and age, no? 



fatslob-:O on 29 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:


Trust me, when I see "the oudated PowerPC", it's so general a lot of people think the architecture itself is too old.

You've got the facts across this thread ...

People are too confused to figure out the difference between instruction set architecture and u-architecture anyways ...



WolfpackN64 on 29 January 2015
fatslob-:O said:
WolfpackN64 said:


Trust me, when I see "the oudated PowerPC", it's so general a lot of people think the architecture itself is too old.

You've got the facts across this thread ...

People are too confused to figure it out the difference between instruction set architecture and u-architecture anyways ...

Oh well, I hope at least some people got to know the difference from this post.



ghost_of_fazz on 29 January 2015

I think that today it's not that much about power and efficiency. It's about production costs. Nintendo is using an extremely custom chip, one that probably cost them quite a bit in R&D, and is costing them quite a bit to manufacture because most probably they're the only ones producing it and buying it... Only to keep hardware backwards compatibility. A backwards compatibility that is pretty easy to achieve via software on x86 and x64 PC's.

Certainly not the point of your topic, but eh.



WolfpackN64 on 29 January 2015
ghost_of_fazz said:
I think that today it's not that much about power and efficiency. It's about production costs. Nintendo is using an extremely custom chip, one that probably cost them quite a bit in R&D, and is costing them quite a bit to manufacture because most probably they're the only ones producing it and buying it... Only to keep hardware backwards compatibility. A backwards compatibility that is pretty easy to achieve via software on x86 and x64 PC's.

Certainly not the point of your topic, but eh.


That's where the PS4 and Xbox One bit themselves in the tail. The Xbox One isn't powerful enough to emulate the 360 without cloud support and the PS3's Cell Processor actually outperforms the PS4's CPU.