http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2013/01/17/wiiu-memory-story/Is anyone release surprised by this?
Nintendo have been known to be build efficient consoles. The Gamecube imho was one of the best engineered consoles of all time. On paper it was clearly inferior to the Xbox, yet in the real world the two consoles were far more evenly matched.
The Gamecube featured eDRAM, something we've seen the Xbox 360, Wii, and now Wii U feature. Its IBM PPC Gekko CPU featured double the cache of the Xbox's Intel CPU, and from all accounts despite being clocked almost half that of the Xbox's CPU it was superior in many ways. Its memory was arguarbly the best of that generation with its 1T-SRAM providing high bandwidth and low latency. The Gamecube still had less RAM then the Xbox, but due to its higher bandwidth and lower latency along with some fantastic texture compression tech from ATi the Gamecube was if anything superior in this regard. The Cube's bus configuration betwen memory, GPU, CPU, was incredibly efficient.
I'm not at all surprised to hear that in the real world the Wii U's memory bandwidth is not an issue. The CPU has as significantly larger amount of cache vs the Xbox 360 and PS3, and it also features a very short pipeline and out of order which should help prevent stalls. The MCM likely has allowed for a significantly higher bus speed between the CPU and GPU vs the HD Twins. The 32 megabytes of eDRAM on the GPU is of course a big help, so too the increased register count for the GPU iteself. No doubt like other Nintendo consoles AMD have provided some efficient texture compression** and other related hardware features to again reduce bandwidth and data sizes. Then there's the MEM1 pool which by all accounts has significantly lower latenacy then the Xbox 360 and PS3's, is also bidirectional, and with double the amount of physical memory available developers should again be able to significantly reduce memory I/O.
As per the OPs post, in the real world the Xbox 360's memory is not capable of 22 gigabytes per second or anywhere near that. The Xbox 360's bus maxes out at around 10 gigabytes per second each way, and it's bandwidth is even lower then 10 gigabytes per second when factor in over heads and stalls. The Xbox 360 also has less then 512 megabytes of RAM available to games, from memory its around 468 megabytes. This is in comparison to the Wii U's 1024 megabytes which is available to developers. A lot more memory swapping and I/O would need to occur on the Xbox 360 to over come its smaller memory capacity, where as with the Wii U developers can reduce memory reads and writes as they can store significnatly more data at a time.
**
