E3 2012: Wii U Specs Leaked

Right ahead of Nintendo’s E3 conference, Wii U specs have been leaked, and boy does it look like a powerful machine. Easily the most powerful console at the time of its release, it seems like the Wii U might have more hardware juice than people were willing to give it credit for.

Here are the specs given in full below, in case you understand that sort of thing, via NeoGAF.

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.