Friday, November 16th 2012
AMD Powers Brilliant HD Game and Video Performance for Nintendo's Wii U
AMD is proud to support Nintendo's newly launched Wii U home console as the supplier of custom AMD Radeon HD GPU technology. As announced at E3 in 2011, the custom-for-Nintendo AMD graphics processor enables Wii U to provide exciting, immersive game play, brilliant HD video and game graphics and new forms of interaction for consumers. Since 2001, AMD technology has been included in more than 118 million Nintendo Wii and GameCube hardware units around the world.1
The AMD GPU will help bring Nintendo's popular franchises into HD for the first time with new innovative game-play experiences, and the new Wii U GamePad controller, which creates a second window into the game world. "Wii U and its GamePad controller offer completely new and unexpected game-play and entertainment experiences," said Genyo Takeda, General Manager, Integrated Research & Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd. "We chose AMD to support our HD gaming efforts with its best-in-class graphics capabilities, and we're proud to call them a technology partner."
"Our relationship with Nintendo is the next exciting chapter in the long AMD history of supplying the game console market with our elite graphics expertise," said Saeid Moshkelani, corporate vice president and general manager, Semi-Custom Business Unit, AMD. "Working so closely with Nintendo to create the ideal custom graphics processor for Wii U is another example of how AMD stands for giving consumers the best video entertainment and gaming experience -- whether that's a next-generation console, desktop and notebook PC, big screen HDTV or tablet."
The new Wii U is available just in time for the Holidays along with other AMD-powered notebooks, tablets and desktops, rounding out tech-savvy consumers' holiday wish list. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, three in four gift-giving adults plan to buy a consumer-electronics product as a gift. AMD-powered products provide superior computing experiences for consumers -- from more brilliant graphics when gaming to longer battery life when on the go -- ultimately letting people do more every day.
The AMD GPU will help bring Nintendo's popular franchises into HD for the first time with new innovative game-play experiences, and the new Wii U GamePad controller, which creates a second window into the game world. "Wii U and its GamePad controller offer completely new and unexpected game-play and entertainment experiences," said Genyo Takeda, General Manager, Integrated Research & Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd. "We chose AMD to support our HD gaming efforts with its best-in-class graphics capabilities, and we're proud to call them a technology partner."
The new Wii U is available just in time for the Holidays along with other AMD-powered notebooks, tablets and desktops, rounding out tech-savvy consumers' holiday wish list. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, three in four gift-giving adults plan to buy a consumer-electronics product as a gift. AMD-powered products provide superior computing experiences for consumers -- from more brilliant graphics when gaming to longer battery life when on the go -- ultimately letting people do more every day.
49 Comments on AMD Powers Brilliant HD Game and Video Performance for Nintendo's Wii U
AMD is going to sell VLIW4/VLIW5 patents/documentation/etc and the ATI name(and brand) for $1.5-$3b(not final price) if you don't know what I'm getting at.
A huge percent of the games what you will see on the Wii-u will be multi-platform games, titles released on the xbox360 and the Ps3 , where devs had to do most of the work on the "powerful" CPUs. What I meant is that porting those games to the wii-u (where the GPU is the strong component), gonna give a hard time to devs with not enough experience or coding skills. And even with good programmers, you gonna need a different approach sometimes (for examlpe, I think Rage would need to use "GPU transcoding" on the Wii-u, something similar what it has on the PC)
Yes, I am fully aware of this and I do know what they were talking about. If You rolled a 1 on "spot a joke" skill check, well, that post of mine was this. ;)
AMD's long term debt has gone from 5.5B in 2008 to 2B in 2012. They are no where near being bankrupt or in being any major financial trouble.
AMD is also powering every next-gen console (Wii U, PS4, Xbox) with either Trinity or some custom GPU and since consoles sell so well they'll probably make a decent amount of money off that.
I'm still waiting for details on the GPU. The CPU is basically a revised version of the CPU in the 360, with maybe one more core. I've heard conflicting reports of it being a tri-core in some places, and a quad-core in others. If it's a tri-core then I'm pretty sure it's quite literally the same CPU as the 360, since it's made by the same people and even sports the same clock speed. The GPU has my interest, because the Wii's GPU was depressingly bad--even for its time.
I am interested to see how the Wii U does, but I have no interest in buying one. I loved Nintendo for quite some time, but I can't justify buying a system just hoping it features a good Zelda and Metroid game. The last Metroid game (for Wii) was pretty lackluster in my books, and even the last couple Zelda games haven't been all that wonderful (not since Majora's Mask imo). I can already tell you this system is going to feature Nintendo throwing developers under the
bus. Every feature they've kind of skirted around so far has ended in them saying it will depend on the developers. VoIP in game? The developer has to make sure they set it up the correct way. Using the tablet with the TV changed to another setting? Developers responsibility. Usefullness of the tablet as a whole? Up to the developer. Honestly, I love Nintendo games on Nintendo systems, but that's about it. I just don't have the money to throw down on a "Zelda\Metroid Console".
was the graphics simplified to achieve that level of smoothness?
$299.99 tempting for Nintendo exclusives
$249.99 I'm sold
Maybe after E3 next year when any news of the other two offerings force the price down. A Zelda game will pursuade me more.
I just can't believe what you said. Nintendo confirmed backwards compatibility to Wii titles. Emulation of the Hollywood won't be a problem on any VLIW5 GPU, but the CPU has to be the same architecture or something different but a lot lot faster.
I think it's more likely that they either added the original Broadway + 2 new modern cores, or they enhanced it by making it multicore and/or added out-of-order execution. Don't forget that 99% of the rumors leaking from devs are talking about large cache and/or edrams on the die, so the size is quite small indeed if you would subtract the size of silicon needed for those.
There are about 3-4 different speculations out there which could be quite plausible, but "Nintendo using the Xeon" was never one of them.The bottom line is that there are absolutely no creditable info about the CPU out there which could be confirmed atm, so if you know anything what the rest of the Internet doesn't, please share;)
Remember, the Wii was basically Nintendo's last ditch effort at console gaming. That's why it was built with such low-end hardware: Nintendo couldn't afford to lose money on every console sold like Sony and Microsoft did. They now have the resources to fiscally compete with Sony and Microsoft so they focused on where the Wii was weakest: hardware.
It shows in the price tag too: $300 debut price versus $250 for the Wii.
At least we know that they are using on of the speed bins of the K4W4G1646B (probably 1600Mhz, but that's just my guess).
6370?
I'm not saying it's the exact same hardware, only that it's very similar. It's not unreasonable to think a revised version of the Xenon could support a majority of the functionality that atrocious Wii CPU had. Worst case scenario, the thing was so weak they could probably just emulate anything it ran...
AMD's net loss is not from just the GPU division.
That being said, whatever slow the hardware is, this guy claims that his sister also playing with the same game on the controller screen while he plays 60fps@HD(1080i?) on the TV, which is probably an efficiency world record with a 30-40W-ish power draw.