Luke HendersonComment

E3 2012 - Rumor - Wii U Specs

Luke HendersonComment

A rumor containing what specs will be contained within that little box called the Wii U.

We have received info from an anonymous source. That comes from the Wii U devkit, so the specifications may change with the retail version (slightly) . To sum up you are not going to have a retail system more powerful than the devkit. Nintendo aren’t going to reveal that kind of information, but you can gain a valuable insight around Wii U specs.
Hardware Features

Main Application Processor

  • PowerPC architecture.
  • Three cores (fully coherent).
  • 3MB aggregate L2 Cache size.
  • core 0: 512 KB
  • core 1: 2048 KB
  • core 2: 512 KB
  • Write gatherer per core.
  • Locked (L1d) cache DMA per core.

Main Memory

  • Up to 3GB of main memory (CAT-DEVs only). Note: retail machine will have half devkit memory
  • Please note that the quantity of memory available from the Cafe SDK and Operating System may vary.

Graphics and Video

  • Modern unified shader architecture.
  • 32MB high-bandwidth eDRAM, supports 720p 4x MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass.
  • HDMI and component video outputs.
Features
  • Unified shader architecture executes vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
  • Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
  • Read from multi-sample surfaces in the shader
  • 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
  • High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
  • Indexed cube map arrays
  • 8 render targets
  • Independent blend modes per render target
  • Pixel coverage sample masking
  • Hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
  • Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
  • Lossless Z & stencil compression
  • 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes
  • sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
  • Tessellation unit
  • Stream out support
  • Compute shader support
GX2 is a 3D graphics API for the Nintendo Wii U system (also known as Cafe). The API is designed to be as efficient as GX(1) from the Nintendo GameCube and Wii systems. Current features are modeled after OpenGL and the AMD r7xx series of graphics processors. Wii U’s graphics processor is referred to as GPU7.

Sound and Audio

  • Dedicated 120MHz audio DSP.
  • Support for 6 channel discrete uncompressed audio (via HDMI).
  • 2 channel audio for the Cafe DRC controller.
  • Monaural audio for the Cafe Remote controller.

Networking

  • 802.11 b/g/n Wifi.

Peripherals

  • 2 x USB 2.0 host controllers x 2 ports each.
    SDCard Slot.

Built-in Storage

  • 512MB SLC NAND for System.
  • 8GB MLC NAND for Applications.

Host PC Bridge

  • Dedicated Cafe-to-host PC bridge hardware.
  • Allows File System emulation by host PC.
  • Provides interface for debugger and logging to host PC.