Hollywood (graphics chip)

Hollywood is a

The initial Hollywood-A revision was built on a 90 nm process and contained three dies. The first die, codenamed Vegas, handled most of the chip's functions. The second die, codenamed Napa, housed the high-speed RAM, while a third die contained EEPROM.

The Hollywood-1 revision, codenamed Bollywood, was manufactured on a 65 nm process and merged Napa and Vegas into a single die.

• 243 MHz graphics chip
• 3 MB embedded GPU memory (eDRAM)
  • 2 MB dedicated to Z-buffer and framebuffer
  • 1 MB texture cache
• 24 MB 1T-SRAM @ 486 MHz (3.9 GB/s) directly accessible for textures and other video data
• Fixed function pipeline (no support for programmable vertex or pixel shaders in hardware)
• Texture Environment Unit (TEV) capable of combining up to 8 textures in 16 stage or "passes"
• ~30 GB/s internal bandwidth^
• ~18 million polygons/second^
• 972 Mpixels/sec peak pixel fillrate

Note: ^ denotes speculation: using confirmed ATI GameCube data x 1.5, a crude but likely accurate way of calculating the Wii's results based on clock speeds and identical architecture.

The Texture Environment Unit (TEV) is a unique piece of hardware exclusive to the GameCube and Wii. The Wii inherited the TEV from Flipper, and the TEV is—to use an analogy from Factor 5 director Julian Eggebrecht—"like an elaborate switchboard that makes the wildest combinations of textures and materials possible."^[1]

The TEV pipeline combines up to 8 textures in up to 16 stages at once. Each stage can apply a multitude of functions to the texture. This was frequently used to simulate pixel shader effects such as bump-mapping, or to perform effects such as cel shading. On the GameCube, Factor 5's Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II used the TEV for the targeting computer effect and the simulated volumetric fog.^[1] In another scenario, Wave Race: Blue Storm used the TEV notably for water distortion (such as refraction) and other water effects.^{[citation needed]} The Wii's TEV unit and TEV capabilities are no different from the GameCube's, excluding indirect performance advantages from the faster clock speeds.^{[citation needed]}

Hollywood contains an ARM926EJ-S core, unofficially known as Starlet.^[2][3] This embedded microprocessor runs the Wii's IOS operating system, and handles various I/O functions, including wireless communication, USB, SD card access, optical disc reading, and internal flash storage.^[4] Starlet also manages security functions, including cryptography, ensuring the console remains secure even if the main Broadway processor is compromised.^[4] Hollywood includes hardware implementations of AES^[5] and SHA-1^[6] to speed up Starlet's security functionality. Starlet communicates with Broadway via an inter-process communication mechanism and can reboot Broadway or provide it with executable code at any time.^[3]