Gaming & Culture —

The Wii’s brains finally exposed?

A new IBM datasheet indicates that the rumors are true: Broadway is a faster, …

Back in August, a set of alleged specs were leaked for the IBM-designed "Broadway" CPU that forms the brains of Nintendo's forthcoming Wii console. I took a look at what the leaked information said about Broadway's microarchitecture, and noted that this exact same information applied to the GameCube's CPU, codenamed Gekko. Because the leaked specs for Broadway were identical for Gekko's specs, I offered the following evaluation:

There are clearly two options here:

  1. The MaxConsole specs are someone's idea of a joke.
  2. The Wii really is just an overclocked GameCube with a DVD player, in which case the joke's on Nintendo.

It appears that, contrary to what I ultimately concluded in the original post, the correct answer is behind door number two.

A poster at the Ace's Hardware message board has dug up a new IBM datasheet for the 750CL, which is a new derivative of the IBM 750 (a.k.a. the G3). Based on the information revealed in the datasheet, the 750CL is basically just a 90nm die shrink of the Gekko hardware that's intended to run at up to 900MHz. IBM almost certainly would not go to the trouble of launching an updated version of Gekko on a new process, unless what many have said all along is in fact true: Broadway is a faster, lower-power version of the GameCube's Gekko hardware.

All of the main Gekko features are there in the 750CL: the paired floating-point pipelines that enable SIMD single-precision operation; the cache locking mechanism that keeps the data cache from being polluted with fast-changing graphics data; the floating-point-to-integer conversion in the load-store pipeline; the two-wide dispatch; and so on.

At this point, however, I'm no longer nearly as upset about the implications of this move as I was back in August. In fact, thanks in large part to my DS Lite, I've gone from being disappointed at Wii's underpowered hardware to actually anticipating the new console. I plan to pick one up when they become generally available, and I'm even hoping to hook my (nongamer) wife on it.

You must to comment.

Channel Ars Technica