Nintendo announce: Nintendo NX

[Deleted member 13524]

Those statements are almost 2 years old and AMD's plans for ARM have somewhat changed (K12 has been delayed several times, for example).

Su also said that one of the design wins would be "beyond gaming", which may or may not be the semi-custom ARM design, which by itself may or may not have gone forward.
At one point I thought the "beyond gaming" could mean Nintendo's announced foray into AAL/QOL devices, but Nintendo has also been awfully quiet about that for 2 years.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Are AMD going to want to court the autonomous car space too?

 

[ANiMUS]

Yeah and I agree worth keeping an eye on, although this would be the 1st time in recent history for AMD that there was no leaks, and man they seem like a sieve when it comes to leaks 1 year before a product is nearly ready.
Even if the leak did not mention Nintendo, we would normally by now be inundated with latest 'ARM+GCN product for gaming' info.
I think I would be more stunned with no leaks rather than the win if it is AMD
Cheers

Um what's GCN? and I think there were some articles where AMD simply stated that they envision both their ARM and x86 chips working in all environments.

Those statements are almost 2 years old and AMD's plans for ARM have somewhat changed (K12 has been delayed several times, for example).

Su also said that one of the design wins would be "beyond gaming", which may or may not be the semi-custom ARM design, which by itself may or may not have gone forward.
At one point I thought the "beyond gaming" could mean Nintendo's announced foray into AAL/QOL devices, but Nintendo has also been awfully quiet about that for 2 years.

If I remember correctly, even the design win that was said to be beyond gaming was still in the gaming department.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Are AMD going to want to court the autonomous car space too?

You mean Nintendo?
Maybe the NX is car-tainment.

 

[CSI PC]

Um what's GCN? and I think there were some articles where AMD simply stated that they envision both their ARM and x86 chips working in all environments.

You must had missed ToTTenTranz earlier post when he raised that AMD could technically do it, same way Nvidia technically does ARM+Maxwell or Pascal.
They need to add a GPU to the ARM solution for this 'gaming' context, and I doubt AMD would buy one from Qualcomm or say the Mali-G71 from ARM, especially if looking to differentiate or push beyond tablet and smartphone performance and capabilities.
Cheers

 

[ANiMUS]

You must had missed ToTTenTranz earlier post when he raised that AMD could technically do it, same way Nvidia technically does ARM+Maxwell or Pascal.
They need to add a GPU to the ARM solution for this 'gaming' context, and I doubt AMD would buy one from Qualcomm or say the Mali-G71 from ARM, especially if looking to differentiate or push beyond tablet and smartphone performance and capabilities.
Cheers

Oh that. Personally i think that whole tablet thing is BS anyway. If you look into what Nintendo has been saying in interviews, investor meetings, and even as far as their hiring, i hybrid tablet that connects to your television seems to go against all that.

 

[liolio]

N

You must had missed ToTTenTranz earlier post when he raised that AMD could technically do it, same way Nvidia technically does ARM+Maxwell or Pascal.
They need to add a GPU to the ARM solution for this 'gaming' context, and I doubt AMD would buy one from Qualcomm or say the Mali-G71 from ARM, especially if looking to differentiate or push beyond tablet and smartphone performance and capabilities.
Cheers

Well technically is easily said, do they have thre resources? How would their GPU perform under heavy power constraints? Nvidia tweaked its GPU in their Tegra lines.

Not sure about the argument going on but for real mobile application AMD solutions are more than unproven they are for now non existant.

 

[CSI PC]

N

Well technically is easily said, do they have thre resources? How would their GPU perform under heavy power constraints? Nvidia tweaked its GPU in their Tegra lines.

Not sure about the argument going on but for real mobile application AMD solutions are more than unproven they are for now non existant.

Well he did say it is very unlikely, and myself ruled them out all together, but maybe it should still have a little weight until news release of the NX; if it is ARM I still think it has to be Nvidia for the facts raised earlier, and not yet convinced about the DMP M3000 series fitting into a hybrid console with games that is officially releasing March 2017 even putting aside the specs.
Cheers

 

[Goodtwin]

If all this Tegra in NX turns out to be BS, Eurogamer is going to receive a ton of criticism. They have delivered their information as if its all but certain, and there really isn't a way for them to back track on it now. Who knows, maybe the Tegra X1 is true, but perhaps NX will not be a single system, and a console will be very different.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

If all this Tegra in NX turns out to be BS, Eurogamer is going to receive a ton of criticism. They have delivered their information as if its all but certain, and there really isn't a way for them to back track on it now.

Naaah.. people will forget. Lots of folks still follow BSNews/VRWorld/Theo Valich.
Even though they didn't launch the rumor like BSNews, eurogamer also claimed they had their own "inside sources" confirming that the 3DS had a Tegra chip. And now almost everyone is placing all their faith in the website and taking the Tegra NX as DOUBLE CONFIRMED.
And if the NX turns out not to have a nvidia SoC (which I progressively believe not to be the case), I'm sure that just like the Tegra 2 3DS there will be some truth to the Tegra NX rumor.
Nintendo apparently did use Tegra 2 as a placeholder for some earlier 3DS devkits, maybe because it was one of the first-ever dual-core ARM SoCs, and one of the weakest (no NEON, only single-channel 32bit memory, rather small and limited GPU). Perhaps they just downclocked the Cortex A9s to <200MHz in order to emulate the dual ARM11@266MHz, downclocked the GPU as well and then told the developers to never go above OpenGL ES 1.1 capabilities, at least for the early development periods.

Perhaps that's what they did with the Tegra X1. Maybe they downclocked the Cortex A57 module or enabled only the A53 module and clocked the GPU towards their performance estimates while waiting for their in-house SoC to come from production.
The Jetson TX1 even supports Vulkan in Linux, so they could even target Vulkan as main API while using these widely available dev boards and keeping their plans a well-guarded secret.

 

[Rikimaru]

semiaccurate reported nvidia in May. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1218933

 

[CSI PC]

Naaah.. people will forget. Lots of folks still follow BSNews/VRWorld/Theo Valich.
Even though they didn't launch the rumor like BSNews, eurogamer also claimed they had their own "inside sources" confirming that the 3DS had a Tegra chip. And now almost everyone is placing all their faith in the website and taking the Tegra NX as DOUBLE CONFIRMED.
.

Well there is also Semi-accurate, Segment Next (they did have the name matching to the official presentation other day from Computerbase.de).
However in that example with the 3DS, SemiAccurate did an article about Tegra failing from a spec perspective and Samsung cancelling their major contract, which could also tie into the 3DS situation.
http://semiaccurate.com/2010/04/14/samsung-dumps-nvidia-tegra/
This time round SemiAccurate are one of the sites suggesting the handheld is Nvidia.
And then it comes down to interpreting Emily Rogers sources and weighting the possibilities; which comes back to probably only Nvidia and DMP, problem though with DMP is the incredibly tight timeline as the console+games launches March 2017 and so far there is only a news announcement from DMP the M3000 series will be shipping first half of 2017, compounded that we do not know if that is all models including the 4-cluster flagship.
It may be possible but that is some logistics.

Cheers

 

[Deleted member 13524]

However in that example with the 3DS, SemiAccurate did an article about Tegra failing from a spec perspective and Samsung cancelling their major contract, which could also tie into the 3DS situation.

When was the last time semiaccurate posted any accurate first-hand news?
Samsung did release a smartphone and their very first Android tablet with a Tegra 2 in the year following that article...
The part about Tegra 2 ever being considered for the 3DS is a bit fishy to me, to be honest.
How was Tegra 2 ever going to match the 3DS' SoC in power consumption with that huge difference in CPU and GPU performance? And how does Nintendo have the time to start developing their own SoC internally with an obscure GPU IP, after nvidia fails to meet a certain power budget? All while having developed their own SoCs for all their handhelds so far?


Why did DMP - who so far has only done simple GPUs for cameras, the 3DS and automobile (they never went over OpenGL ES 2.0 in previous GPU IPs AFAIK, probably never did unified shaders either) - all of a sudden comes up with a much larger GPU that is compatible with Vulkan, OpenCL 1.3 and can scale up to 1 TFLOPs?
Moreover they're claiming that SoCs will be shipping in devices during H1 2017, so whoever's interested in the architecture has definitely been working with them for quite a while. Other GPU IP makers like ARM, Vivante and IMGTech announce their new GPUs architectures many months or even years before any SoCs are even announced with said architectures. Certainly there was a reason to keep quiet about the M3000 architecture so far. And why announce it so close to what is rumored to be the NX's official presentation?

 

[cheapchips]

I thought the 3DS Eurogamer Tegra report did stem from some Dev kits actually having Tegra2 in them.

This time around, dev kits actually have X1's in them. It's hardly Eurogamers/DFs fault if the final product has something else in it. They've been candid that's where the Tegra info comes from and expressed uncertain as to what the final Soc is.

It would surely be a bit weird of Nintendo to switch soc manufacturers during development for a 2nd time running.

 

[ANiMUS]

I thought the 3DS Eurogamer Tegra report did stem from some Dev kits actually having Tegra2 in them.

This time around, dev kits actually have X1's in them. It's hardly Eurogamers/DFs fault if the final product has something else in it. They've been candid that's where the Tegra info comes from and expressed uncertain as to what the final Soc is.

It would surely be a bit weird of Nintendo to switch soc manufacturers during development for a 2nd time running.

Well if Nintendo really is using DMP then it would make sense to have another chip as a place holder. The chip from DMP isn't supposed be on the market yet so it's not like Nintendo can send out dev kits with chips that hasn't been released yet.

 

[CSI PC]

Why did DMP - who so far has only done simple GPUs for cameras, the 3DS and automobile (they never went over OpenGL ES 2.0 in previous GPU IPs AFAIK, probably never did unified shaders either) - all of a sudden comes up with a much larger GPU that is compatible with Vulkan, OpenCL 1.3 and can scale up to 1 TFLOPs?
Moreover they're claiming that SoCs will be shipping in devices during H1 2017, so whoever's interested in the architecture has definitely been working with them for quite a while. Other GPU IP makers like ARM, Vivante and IMGTech announce their new GPUs architectures many months or even years before any SoCs are even announced with said architectures. Certainly there was a reason to keep quiet about the M3000 architecture so far. And why announce it so close to what is rumored to be the NX's official presentation?

It does not scale to 1 TFLOP but maxes out at a theoretical 800 GFLOPS in the flagship 4-cluster GPU, and we have no similar generation from them to be able to base this level of high mobile/hybrid performance of being real world, nor precisely what that 200-800 GFLOPS is (look at how Nvidia report the Tegra predominantly as FP16).
On the product page they say: "M3000 series is, by-configurable shader cluster configuration, you can achieve better performance than 800GFLOPS from 200GFLOPS "
I would say they need compatibility with Vulkan/OpenCL/etc because they are competing against GPU SoC related products from Qualcomm/ARM/etc who are investing time and resources in mobile development gaming engines (such as Unreal Engine 4 and Epic Games) or other technology sectors; the M3000 series as they say in product page:"smartphone, tablet, in-vehicle equipment, TV, game machine, multifunction machine, amusement equipment, digital camera , etc."

Furthermore this is a 28nm generation, though that may not matter.
Just curious how many manufacturers when giving a launch date do not use their own mass production factory date but instead only give that of a clients use of that component?
Usually they give a mass production date and wins separately where they may provide further associated dates, which is why I am not sure that 1st half 2017 launch date they report actually means Nintendo shipping the NX with the full SoC as you feel it does, I appreciate part of this comes down to interpretation as they do state "SoC products" so I accept I could be wrong but seems unusual to omit the mass production date for a client's date.
It will be interesting to see when engineering samples are out there or sampling status is given for the DMP3000 as I would expect IHVs would want to test and evaluate it.
Cheers

 

[Rodéric]

DMP M3000 makes a lot more sense given Nintendo japanese centric mind and past experience/behaviour...
Still would prefer something unique rather than something me too when it comes to tech even if the device itself will likely be unique, which is good, I'm bored of all those PC w/o keyboards sold these days ;p

 

[cheapchips]

Latest report is that the NX has linear actuators like Steam/Vive controllers. Can imagine first party titles make great use of that if it's the case.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

A fairly candid interview with Reggie Fils-Aimé about Nintendo's future, NX and acknowledgement of the mistakes they made with Wii U. Nothing specific, NX info will come later. Realising where they need to improve, and admitting it, is personal growth. Well done, Nintendo.

 

[Globalisateur]

A fairly candid interview with Reggie Fils-Aimé about Nintendo's future, NX and acknowledgement of the mistakes they made with Wii U. Nothing specific, NX info will come later. Realising where they need to improve, and admitting it, is personal growth. Well done, Nintendo.

He only acknowledged that they had not enough compelling games in the beginning and that "We have to do a better job helping people to understand its uniqueness"... whatever that means.

I am sorry but they still don't know the main reasons why WiiU failed. He is either desperately clueless or not at all candid.