A closer look at the "leaked" Wii specs
8/2/2006 2:19:58 PM, by Jon Hannibal Stokes
I've been a bit out of the loop for the past two days, so I'm just now getting around to checking out the allegedly "leaked" Wii specs posted by MaxConsole.net. After the site's original story met with skepticism, their source mailed them a more detailed breakdown of the supposed capabilities of the Wii's Broadway CPU and Hollywood GPU. Take a look at what MaxConsole reported for Broadway:
32KB associative L1 Icache
32KB associative L1 Dcache with 16KB data scratchpad
Super-scalar microprocessor with five different execution units:
2 integer units, 1 FPU, and 1 loadstore unit and branch unit
DMA unit servicing 16KB data scratchpad.
DMA request queue - 15-entry.
Write-gather buffer for writing graphics command lists to the video system.
Embedded 256KB 2-way set-associative L2 unified cache.
2 32-bit Integer Units (IU)
1 FPU, 32 and 64-bit bus width
The FPU supports Floating Point Paired Singles (FP/PS)
Branch Unit provides static AND dynamic branch prediction
Features Out-Of-Order execution which means that when an instruction delays because of data access, subsequent opcodes can continue to be decoded and executed.
Oh, waitaminute... I'm sorry. Those are specs I copied and pasted from one of the many pages of unofficial Gekko documentation that I was able to dig up on Google with a few keystrokes. The MaxConsole list features the same data, in the same order, with a few phrasing tweaks and the MHz numbers revised upwards.
For what it's worth, I even went back to my own archive of official GameCube docs to verify the specs above, and I picked through the MaxConsole post looking for something that might set their information apart as different from Gekko—an enlarged buffer, a reduced latency, a new functional block, anything—but I came up empty-handed. This being the case, there are clearly two options here:
The MaxConsole specs are someone's idea of a joke.
The Wii really is just an overclocked GameCube with a DVD player, in which case the joke's on Nintendo.
Personally, I have a hard time imagining that IBM, ATI, and Nintendo have invested all this time and money into a product that's basically a speedbump of an existing product. If Wii were just a GameCube with a DVD player and a funky controller, you'd think it would be out already. And here's another clue: I know and have reported before that Apple was offered Broadway as a possible laptop chip, but I just can't see IBM offering them the above single-issue design with a straight face. What's outlined above isn't even a G4. It's a heavily tweaked G3, and it would be a big step backwards from the G4.
My conclusion is that whatever Broadway is, the specs above don't do it justice.
Quellen:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060802-7407.html
http://infendo.com/
Soviel dazu...
