The NeoGAF community started a collection to buy Chipworks' reverse-engineering photos of the Wii processors, but alas the existing photography wouldn't have told us anything new. On the left we see the markings on the heatspreader while on the right we see the metal shield removed and the GPU and CPU revealed.

So, what does the new shot below actually tell us? Well, first of all, let's be clear about how we draw our conclusions. Graphics cores work principally by spreading work in parallel over a vast array of processors. On the die shot, this manifests as the same mini-blocks of transistors "copied and pasted" next to one another. We know that the Wii U hardware is based on AMD's RV770 line of processors - essentially the Radeon HD 4xxx cards - so we have some point of comparison with existing photography of equivalent AMD hardware.Chipworks' shot is still being analysed, but the core fundamentals are now seemingly beyond doubt. The Wii U GPU core features 320 stream processors married up with 16texture mapping units and featuring 8 ROPs. After the Wii U's initial reveal at E3 2011, our take on the hardware was more reserved than most. "We reckon it probably has more in common with the Radeon HD 4650/4670 as opposed to anything more exotic," we said at the time. "The 320 stream processors on those chips would have more than enough power to support 360 and PS3 level visuals, especially in a closed-box system."It was ballpark speculation at the time based on what we had eyeballed at the event, but the final GPU is indeed a close match to the 4650/4670, albeit with a deficit in the number of texture-mapping units and a lower clock speed - 550MHz. AMD's RV770 hardware is well documented so with these numbers we can now, categorically, finally rule out any next-gen pretensions for the Wii U - the GCN hardware in Durango and Orbis is in a completely different league. However, the 16 TMUs at 550MHz and texture cache improvements found in RV770 do elevate the capabilities of this hardware beyond the Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360 - 1.5 times the raw shader power sounds about right. 1080p resolution is around 2.5x that of 720p, so bearing in mind the inclusion of just eight ROPs, it's highly unlikely that we'll be seeing any complex 3D titles running at 1080p.All of which may lead some to wonder quite why many of the Wii U ports disappoint - especially Black Ops 2, which appears to have been derived from the Xbox 360 version, running more slowly even at the same 880x720 sub-hd resolution. The answer comes from a mixture of known and unknown variables.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df...nally-revealed

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