Reggie keeps making comments about the 1080p-ness of the system. I guess it's certainly possible that the system could be made to be render games at 1080p standard. If so, that would most certainly narrow out some choices as to what GPUs Nintendo could be employing, especially if the system is made to match the 360 and PS3 graphically but with higher output resolution. Going 1080p means having twice the pixel rate as Xenos or RSX, which both have 8 ROPs. 16 ROPs is virtually required because of that, unless you clock an 8 ROP part really high, but that would make little sense for a small box like the Wii U which will be power and thermally constrained.
That makes RV740, RV770 and Juniper prime candidates, assuming Nintendo went off-the-shelf. Juniper and RV740 make more sense due to their 128 bit memory interfaces as far as power concerns go, and are ready for GDDR5 in order to give them good bandwidth, cutting RV770 out of the equation. Between RV740 and Juniper, I would then go with Juniper for it's extra TMUs, better realized tessellation capability which could be put to good use, as well as better multi display capability, which would be useful for Wii U's controller system. Not to say RV740, couldn't deal with the dual screen design, it's just that Evergreen and beyond is better suited to it. I also think it's entirely possible Ninty could be using a Southern Islands equivalent of Juniper, something on 32 nm.
My speculations here are based on a 1920 x 1080p output as standard, which pretty much also requires not only 16 ROPs for 360 equivalent graphics, but a healthy memory bandwidth and amount of memory. Juniper with 1 GB of GDDR5 fits that job nicely, is affordable and is not too power hungry, especially in a mobile type package used in 5870M form. The multi display out capabilities round out the features. All that pretty much means Juniper will still much more room for potential quality growth well beyond 360 graphics at 1080p, considering even at a conservative 500 MHz clock speed (desktop versions of the 5770 go beyond 850 MHz), the chip still has over 3x the shader capability (800 vs 240 GFLOPS).
I still like the idea of RV740 though, just because it was such a great GPU lol.
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