Nintendo has been keeping mum on the hardware specifications of its upcoming console, the Wii U, which is slated for release later this year.
The leaked specifications have been confirmed by a known developer with SDK access on the NeoGAF forums, who says that they aren't target specs, but rather the actual specs of the Wii U dev kit from late 2011.
There will undoubtedly be a number of changes made to the final specs of the retail version of the Wii U, but it should be fairly close to what you see below.
Main Application Processor
- PowerPC architecture.
- Three cores (fully coherent).
- 3MB aggregate L2 Cache size.
- core 0: 512 KB
- core 1: 2048 KB
- core 2: 512 KB
- Write gatherer per core.
- Locked (L1d) cache DMA per core.
Main Memory
- Up to 3GB of main memory (CAT-DEVs only). Note: retail machine will have half devkit memory
- Please note that the quantity of memory available from the Cafe SDK and Operating System may vary.
Graphics and Video
- Modern unified shader architecture.
- 32MB high-bandwidth eDRAM, supports 720p 4x MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass.
- HDMI and component video outputs.
Features
- Unified shader architecture executes vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
- Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
- Read from multi-sample surfaces in the shader
- 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
- High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
- Indexed cube map arrays
8 render targets
- Independent blend modes per render target
- Pixel coverage sample masking
- Hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
- Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
- Lossless Z & stencil compression
- 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes
- sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
- Tessellation unit
- Stream out support
- Compute shader support
GX2 is a 3D graphics API for the Nintendo Wii U system (also known as Cafe). The API is designed to be as efficient as GX(1) from the Nintendo GameCube and Wii systems. Current features are modeled after OpenGL and the AMD r7xx series of graphics processors. Wii U’s graphics processor is referred to as GPU7.
Sound and Audio
- Dedicated 120MHz audio DSP.
- Support for 6 channel discrete uncompressed audio (via HDMI).
- 2 channel audio for the Cafe DRC controller.
- Monaural audio for the Cafe Remote controller.
Networking
- 802.11 b/g/n Wifi.
Peripherals
- 2 x USB 2.0 host controllers x 2 ports each.
- SDCard Slot.
Built-in Storage
- 512MB SLC NAND for System.
- 8GB MLC NAND for Applications.
Host PC Bridge
- Dedicated Cafe-to-host PC bridge hardware.
- Allows File System emulation by host PC.
- Provides interface for debugger and logging to host PC.
