Tested the Hardware of the Wiiu
On November 30th, the time has finally come when Nintendo’s new miracle console will finally appear in Europe. The WiiU has already been launched in America, and various hobbyists have already taken the WiiU apart and devoted themselves more closely to the inner workings of the console.
First of all, the drive from Panasonic catches the eye. This reads the 25GB game discs at a speed of 22MB per second and is therefore significantly faster than the PS3 and XBox 360 drives.
There are also two antennas next to it. One is a Hon Hai Win-A2 802.11b/g/n WiFi adapter which, as the name suggests, is used to connect the WiiU to the internet. The other is responsible for the transmission between the console and the unique gamepad. The Hon Hai MIC-B2 11n WiFi module streams HD data between the console and the gamepad with minimal latency – the so-called Miracast method, developed by Nintendo and Broadcom, represents a real innovation in the console sector.
The main memory is 2GB of RAM, divided into four 4 Gb (Gigabits) Hynix DDR3-1600 memory blocks each, which is shared between the GPU and the CPU. Meanwhile, the memory bandwidth of the 16-bit memory is 12.8 GB/s, which is inherently lower than the competing consoles, which, however, have significantly less RAM available.
In addition, a total of three, and not two as previously suspected, chips were found under the heat spreader. The first is the CPU and is based on IBM’s 45nm SOI process, making the WiiU backward compatible with the Wii.
An ATI Radeon RV7xx was installed as the graphics processor, which means that the GPU is five times larger than the CPU – a novelty in the gaming sector. However, nothing further is known about the function of the third chip found. However, it is speculated that this is a small off-chip memory. The operating system of the WiiU in the basic version is meanwhile found on an 8 GB NAND flash chip from Samsung.
Features of the Commodore C64
It left Apple and other competitors far behind in its prime – the Commodore C64. In its heyday, between 1982 and 1994, it was sold up to 30 million times and thus had almost half of the market share. First released in the US, the C64 could be purchased for $595. In Germany, the home computer could only be bought 12 months later for around 1,500 DM.
As with all technical devices, however, the price of the C64 also fell quickly – a short time later it cost 1000 DM. One reason for this was that Commodore made the chips themselves. This represented an enormous cost advantage, which the customers could also be happy about. The enormous advantage was also used against the competition for targeted advertising, which was mainly considered very aggressive in the USA.
If Jack Tramiel had decided to also offer the C64 in computer shops, the success would probably not have been so great. He only wanted to sell the home computer through mail order companies and retail chains. Aldi, Quelle and Allkauf were points of contact in Germany, through which the C64 was already sold over a million times in 1986. With the takeover of the Atari company and a personal vendetta by Jack Tramiel, however, the C64 had a later competitor.
The graphics were simple – light blue letters on a dark blue screen, accompanied by beeping sounds as music. Hours could be spent playing games like “International Soccer” in front of the C64. The later purchased storage drive for audio cassettes, called Datasette, perfected the first small home computer.
