Its not that simple, parts and stuff usually add on another $100 on top of everything, also you're forgetting licensing, a DVD or BR drive, and R&D and employees

darth-pyschosis

My pricing was taken from a quote from an analsyst, but i looked it up myself and Llano is competing with intel i3 systems, at $125, the Llano will be cheaper, and Trinity is an even cheaper model as it's second generation, and bought in bulk, 75-100 is what nintendo will pay for it, the other pieces of hardware can all be had for 120 dollars, and a 30-50 dollar controller on top of it, my guess is 30 would put the system at 250 max, and sell at 299.99 or even 349.99 because nintendo won't take a hit, but the tech won't need to, as for your other specs, i agree with 16GB internal flash, but it will likely have 1GB GDDR5 with atleast 88MB T1 SDRAM, the other stuff is all nickles and dimes, dvd licences are cheap, if they use blu ray, well those need to be faster but it's possible now that the price has come down and they want multiconsole games. r

You yourself believe it will be a 349.99 console, Trinity or apu's in generally are nintendo's best bet for price, heck the 360slim has a bastardized APU from AMD and IBM in it, you can expect Nintendo to have an AMD GPU why wouldn't they pick up an APU and save themselves some money...? The Trinity card is likely to push a GPU somewhere in the 4800/5700/6700/7600 line of performance (which happens to be the same range of power, the Llano carries a 6550 inside, Trinity's will be faster, but nintendo will use a slightly custom GPU, because they like to tweak numbers, the french site stated the graphics were around R700 (4800 series) this isn't a crack pot's theory, it's logical and thought out.

http://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/28550974/project-cafe-logical-thought-out-specs-based-on-facts.?tag=topics%3Btitlespecs easily fit into 350 dollars... crazy i know!

you seem to be assuming that nintendo will go for the highest end version of trinity. given nintendos past even pre the wii this is highly unlikely. console manufactuers dont tend to get the very best hardware. LLano can have up to 400 shaders but there are lesser models with 160 shaders. the lowest 4 core version has just 320 shaders. i hope your right on the GPU front of course but when the trinity lineup is revealed i wouldnt be looking at the highest end model..id be looking at the lower middle end....probably the lowest end model with 4 cores or even splitting the difference between the highest end 2 core and lowest end 4 core. ninty do like to tinker with their specs. as for CPU speed...aye basically the bulldozer equivelent of 3.2GHz in 360 CPU speed. but have those extra tricks and features of bulldozer also. as for ram...i cant see 2GB happening. 1GB is possible and i think would be spot on. but again looking at nintendos history they do tend to skimp on the amount of ram but go for really fast stuff with a high bandwidth. rumours are pointing to ninty thinking "make 360/PS3 ports easy". they dont need 2GB or even 1GB to do that.

on storage...i have a 20GB HDD in my 360. im no media nut but even then 20GB isnt really much. 16GB even less so. im assuming of course that ninty will be providing demos and downloads of GC and wii games as well as upping the game size limit significantly for wiiware2. thats with all the current stuff available on the wii also. im also hopeful that ninty and sega will add DC games also....but we shall see. however demos can clock in a 2GB a piece, GC games are around the 1.5GB mark, wii can fo up to about 8GB (though most are probably around 2GB)....it fills up fast. i think ninty want to avoid the hassle around memory management in the wii and a HDD is the best way to do that. i do agree on the no installs policy....but devs will also be much happier with a HDD for caching and i dont think ninty can really be anti caching. its used quite extensively for both the PS3 and 360. they can cache to internal solid state storage also but it puts an awful strain on the chip and could cause it to wear down faster.osan0

APU:

Trinity is a mainstream chip, I am assuming they will go for the best performance for the Wattage, 65Watt 400SP for Llano, more then likely 480SP for Trinity, the SP's should be more effcient then the Llano's as well, so you would gain some extra performance there as well, the 6000 series out performs the 5000 series with less SP's for instance, and the Trinity will have 7000 series GPU inside (28nm tech) so it should be cheaper, smaller, less energy hungry, and faster than Llano, to be perfectly 100% honest, the reason I am guessing the GPU being so high powered is because of the guess made by the french site that trouted R700 spec for GPU (as an estimate of power) which means the 4870, but with the effects of current gen GPU's, or the 6700 series (which is the rename of the 5770 series)

GPU Price/Performance: The GPU beyond it being part of an APU part, I'm the most sure about it's performancein my speculation, the price of the chip will be very resonable as it will sell in a 500-700 dollar laptop, saving the fastest APU part for high end laptops. so as to your statement about GPU, I am picking middle of the road, mainstream components that match the rumor R700 spec with the most logical route for Nintendo to go.

Memory: 1GB GDDR5 memory is my guess for the system mostly for the GPU's need to not hit a bottleneck, the system will also have atleast 88 (though I would estimate 128mb memory to 256mb for upscale) of T1 SRAM for emulation of the Wii/Gamecube through the console, caching of some files can fit here, and internal flash memory can be used for anything beyond that.

Storage: 16gb internal memory is by no means the lowest Nintendo could go, it's just as likely that they will go for 8GB's of internal memory and less likely that they will go with 32GB internal flash memory, I do believe they will go with flash memory as it caches a lot faster, and will help with any ware titles that were produced for the 2GB internal flash of the Wii. I do believe they will again have a SD card slot and go up to atleast 32gb's as well as USB ports on the console.

Virtual Console: I can see Dreamcast being a Virtual console page, but Gamecube and Wii will be emulated from the console, both a Gamecube controller's functionality is already rumored to be matched, as well as motion controls. Let me add to this that I don't see them really trying to support them beyond this until next generation whenstorage is 10gb's on the dollar for hard drive space.

One last note: If Nintendo is pushing for ports of multiconsole games from this generation, they will also see the benifit of getting 1GB ram for when PS720 comes out with 2/4GB ram, as it will definently port over those games even if they sit at 720P on N6, also for people thinking 512mb would becheaper, the answer to that is yes and NO because 1GB is a standard memory size of GDDR5, and GDDR5 is what Trinity should be spec'd for, it makes sense that that will be the GPU's memory, 1080p can be fine on 512MB, but you won't have the best textures, and Nintendo's smartest move is to hit Sony and Microsoft hard by releasing 2 years before they can follow. There is no denying that Nintendo is smart, they are probably announcing this console this e3 and not TGS because Microsoft just started hiring for their next console, which means Spring 2014 at the earliest even with a rush job simply because it will take them about 6 Months for the hires to be filled, a year to punch out the actual console, 1 year to fit up specs, and6 monthsto get that hardware in 3-5 million boxes. Beyond that PS4 will have an advantage to pick out better hardware, and Microsoft will want to minimize that since sony isn't coming out till end of 2014 or 8 years after PS3, simply because their box won't look that outdated next to N6, nothinglike what the PS2 looked like compared to 360 in 2005.

I like your thought on all this.... it's nice to see someone put this technical spin on their own theory. Even if your wrong, Iit's still fun to speculate on this.

If this package can all be thrown together for Nintendo to make a profit from day one, I'd be with you a 100%. If anything in your list of parts doesn't work out in their minds, this will not work.

redlightstudios

Yeah I agree completely, it should be well within the price range.

The Trinity Processor should cost 100-175, for a bulk order the price would range from 75-125(this is based off Llano's prices)the Internal 16GB's would be under 50, and the ram would be 30 or so, I'd say the entire thing could be made at 160-210 throw in a 30 to 50 dollar controller, and Nintendo can walk away with atleast 40 dollars a console sale at 299.99 not including Retail's share.

Well I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that GC had Shaders, I know Xbox did, and I think PS2 had very limited Shaders.

I don't really get what you're trying to say though, lol

magnax1

Gamecube and Wii do not have Shaders, basically while they process graphics, the graphics cards themselves have no instruction set, shaders are needed for GPU's to be programmed with their own code, this is why high voltage is even a well known wii developer, because they are tricking the wii into emulating shader effects. Here is some more on shaders:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shader

Hope this helps you understand the vast differences between the Wii and 360, and why that difference is still greater than a 360 and current CPU tech. (though I am not speaking on power, mostly on ability)

im not convinced TC on your performance speculation. ive tried to find details on trinity but outside of it being a bulldozer CPU and a DX11 GPU details remain thin. the videos you have posted are very impressive for an APU...but there just demos and under very controlled conditions. they didnt show any high octane action with huge explosions and lots of things happenign on the screen for example. of course trininty will be more powerful than llano but how much more powerful? as i posted in another thread how many cores? how fast will they be? whats the GPU? how many SPs will there be? how fast will the GPU be? i think your point about CE3 will also be off as i dont think trinity will be that powerful. it should be able to run CE3 of course at the same settings as the 360 and PS3 but that video is of CE3 without restrictions basically. i remain unconvinced that trinity will be a big enough jump from llano to pull anything remotely close to that off...even with the usual to the metal programming of consoles. rumours are only pointing to something a little more powerful than a PS3 and 360. so looking at your specs...i think your right on the CPU. 4 core bulldozer especially would be nice :D. but i think your in the right ballpark there. on the GPU front...i think your aiming a bit high. it could very well be a DX11 GPU but i think the SP count will be around the 250-300 mark...probably running at around 550MHz (again going back to that roughly as powerful as a PS3 and 360). basically around speculated 7450 mark maybe (just looking at the 6450 which has 160 shaders...so 7450 may have 250-300 or so). ram:...im hoping for a gig but i think 768MB will be closer to the mark. i think we can definately say that they wont go below 512MB. i dont think the 1T ram is necessary though. ninty may need to put the wiis GPU in also as emulating that could be a problem. but i dont think they will need to put all the wiis hardware in also. whatever CPU the wii2 will have should be good enough for dealing with wii games and the main ram can be used for ram for wii games also. the GC could emulate the N64 when necessary and those 2 consoles had completly different setups....the wii2 should be able to smash its way through that problem basically. on storage: i think ninty will bite the bullet and use something like a laptop HDD. SSDs are not practical for a console in terms of costs. ninty admitted they got the storage solution for the wii completly wrong so i think there just going to have a 100GB HDD in there instead and call it quits. i agree that ninty wont allow game installs though but the HDD could be used for demos, vids, movies, TV shows, patches and such like. ninty are making noise about this kind of stuff with the 3DS and i think they will run with it for the wii2. 16GB wont cut it if thats the case and although SD cards can be upgraded HDDs offer much better bang per buck. all speculation on my part of course though.osan0

Llano:

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2011/2011031901_First_Llano_A-series_CPUs_detailed.html

As you can see Llano comes with 400SP's at 65Watts, Trinity is going to be more powerful, these are facts. Llano has a 6550 inside of it, Trinity's chip will be a series 7000 part.

A more Tech heavy response is that Trinity will be:

2 or 4 core Bulldozer CPU over 2Ghz (though we are not sure what this means in performance, but simular to an i7 over 2ghz is likely)

GPU: Minimum of 480SP is likely, but those SP's are on a new instruction set over the R700, and should produce simular performances.

RAM: will have to be over 512MB, I understand your thinking on this, but it's a huge bottleneck, it will likely be 1GB RAM but 2 would be ideal, it's a realistic tech spec.

Storage: 16GB internal memory is fine as the eShop will never have huge games on it, I doubt you'll ever see anything over 1GB on there this next generation, and thats fine, you won't see games being installed to the hard drive either, Nintendo is more of an instant on type company.

Price for these internals are actually cheap, again the Trinity will be custom for Nintendo, I'll dub it Triforce until Nintendo names it, but you will likely get a 80 to 150 price point, the lower number is bulk purchase thought out, while the higher is taking them at prices we would pay. the rest of the hardware will sit below 50 dollars, the entire console could easily cost 200 - 250 to build thanks to the insane controller with a 6inch screen. 299 is the retail price I would guess at.

Hopefully this helps you understand the tech a bit better, 300SP's is far too low for the Trinity's gaming models.

So assuming that Sony and Microsoft wait another year after Wii2 is out, and go all out in terms of technology and the speculation about Wii2's power is correct the Wii2 would probably be like the DC compared to the Xbox and GC?

magnax1

A true comparison would be Gamecube to Wii

The thing most people over look is that the PS2/Wii vs 360/PS3 is an ancient tech (no shaders) to a current tech (Shaders yay) 360 and PS3 will never be unable to handle most things even modern PC's can handle, they just can't do everything at once.

Gamecube to Wii will be the difference between N6 and PS4/Xbox3

Well I was just completely wrong then :Pmeetroid8

Understandable, there is an ATI sticker on the side of the case, and my conclusion is the same as yours, Nintendo is probably using another ATI chip because they have used them in the past, this is especially true because AMD is making their CPU which is the same company, also it's not completely impossible for IBM's CPU to be inside a fusion chip ala 360's slim design is an IBM CPU and ATI GPU duct tape together on 1 piece of silcon, but this goes against reports that AMD is building a CPU for a 2012 console launch.

uhh... sorry for the draw out there... in the end I think you were on the right track and just were a bit off on actual facts, but thinking was clear and logical.

This is very well thought out, but weren't Nintendo's last couple systems using ATI developed CPU's? If so its very possible they'll go that route again.meetroid8

Gamecube:

CPU: IBM powerPC

GPU: Art-X (bought out by ATI)

Wii:

CPU: IBM powerPC

GPU: ATI -bought out by AMD (custom chip designed around Gamecube's custom design)

N6:

CPU: AMD (according to an AMD Engineer who leaked the info that they are making a CPU for a game console to be released in fall 2012)

GPU: AMD (This is likely the same chip as the CPU, AMD has been creating FUSION processors for a while, Trinity releases in fall 2012 and has a CPU/GPU inside one chip, they are cheaper to build, less to purchase and should run Nintendo between 80 and 120 a pop, which is perfect for performance per dollar)

Because this part is 1 chip instead of 2, and is 32nm, it likely can fit in a simular (though some what larger) size casing, which will really be something nintendo thinks of doing, Llano is a 55Watt system, while Trinity is faster, it should meet simular requirements for power. For examplehttp://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Nettop-moves-to-dualcore-Atom/this is a passively cooled system with 38watt power draw, it's faster sibling is over 40 watts and nearly fanless. A more active cooling system will be effcient for a box slightly bigger then Wii.

Nice read. I'll admit I didnt really understand much of what you said. Except for the part where you said it would be way more powerful than the PS3 and 360 (lol). I think it could be true, but I believe alot of what has been heard are just rumors that will leave the real technical gamers dissapointed (though Im hoping the rumors are wrong in the sense that project cafe ends up getting better specs than what was leaked, which I think would leave everyone happily surprised, lol)

Gamingclone

Actually the rumor'd specs aren't far off, a R700 4870 (which is actually in my computer) has over 1300 GFLOPS of processing power, is slightly faster than a 5770, and is slightly slower than what is expected inside the Trinity. For a lamen's comparison the 360 has under 300 GFLOPS of processing power, you have 5 times the processing power, so 300 zombies in Dead Rising turns into 1500, don't know how many pikmin this is, but it's a lot. :P

uhh I'm having a little bit of trouble understanding all this tech talk, could someone break it down to into simpler terms please?

G-dorf11

Llano (the 2011 version of the tech, Trinity will be even more powerful with an even faster CPU)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdPi4GPEI74

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJD9jWDFcOU&feature=relatedanother example of graphics, though Trinity is more powerful, also a closed system will perform even better then this here, so Wii 2's visuals should be graphically superior to this here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxATxZbiD_A&playnext=1&list=PL0EBE8760ED87B28Canother.

Last but not least, here is potential graphics possible on the system:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJEL9Kipuw4

PS3 and Xbox 360 can actually run this engine but with some effects turned down or off, so I hope no one starts thinking I'm a crackpot, just to prove my point I'll give you a crysis 2 consoles vs pc comparison and you be the judge, keep in mind Nintendo's next console should outshine these consoles in both CPU and Graphics, and should have more ram.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdVE4KvJTBA&feature=related

and before anyone gives me anymore trouting rumors as facts, I'm very clear that there are no facts, but a pretty heavy rumor last year about AMD making a cpu, which is what this is all about, and why trinity is what is likely powering the Wii2, I hope nintendo just calls it TriForce, because it should be a custom part, and I'd love that haha.

That's a great speculation, props for that. But i can't help but be a bit of a pessimist.

I really think they will put 512 MB of RAM main memory. That's more than the HD consoles (both use 256 for main memory; another 256 for video memory), and that'll be a humonguous jump from the Wii (which has like 96MB of RAM).

I'll be sad if that happens, but i think that'll be the case. There's basically no doubt in my mind, that they will put 512 or less. Despite that, we have to remember that a powerful GPU and CPU can make up for that, easily.

Lucianu

Well even if the main system is 512MB ala Xbox, there is still the T1 SDram that Nintendo would need to emulate, about 100MB is needed minimum, so I'd guess atleast 128MB T1 and 512MB GDDR5 memory, that is still a nice jump over the xbox and ps3 thanks to speed and the extra 128MB T1 ram, but it's more likely they will go for a balanced system then low cost, they have always choosen balance even if the wii was low spec'd it could of been worse had they not done the right thing.

I'll stand behind my 1GB RAM and I do think it will be GDDR5 simply because the GPU won't see a bottleneck, and it's more power effient.