nintendo made the best moves they could by focusing on the market where they are still relevant, at the same time making something for there small dwindling home console market. they know the market has changed and competing with sony/Microsoft won't get them any where, the switch is a great portable console, the only problem is, it should be 250$.
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nintendo made the best moves they could by focusing on the market where they are still relevant, at the same time making something for there small dwindling home console market. they know the market has changed and competing with sony/Microsoft won't get them any where, the switch is a great portable console, the only problem is, it should be 250$.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
Hey guys, what would you speculate Nintendo & Nvidia might do for an iterative Switch upgrade, and then a full second generation Switch further down the road?
Taking into account Nvidia's Tegra roadmap.
Taking into account Nvidia's Tegra roadmap.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
They did a spec bump with DSi and New3DS so who knows. Mobile hardware is still improving a lot every year, combined with the Switch acting as a home console as well I think stretching Switch lifetime to 6 years is rather long, even with an upgraded model in between. A slightly shorter generation and full BC for Switch games on Switch 2 might be better. 300 launch price and maybe a price drop to 250 next year might make a 3 ~ 4 year generation more palatable.
This is true, but 3DS was using technology that was a solid 4 years old with significantly underclocked CPU. Switch is only a solid two years old with significantly underclocked CPU. With n3DS Nintendo had enough room to both improve battery life despite greatly expanding the specs. With Switch I'm not so sure, and you really hit diminishing returns with the practical observable improvements brought on by spec bumps.
I could see them prioritizing on getting power consumption and price down instead.
Rootax
Veteran
The devs kit documentation said that 3 core were available for gaming, no ? So I guess, no, the A53s are not enabled. If they were, why lock 1 "big core" for the background task / OS ... ?
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
Maybe that core is only used when Switch is running the full OS and the A53 cores are used when Switch is in sleep mode, only running simple things such as background downloads.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
I was only replying to the bolded part, I have no idea whether those cores are enabled.
If they're on die, they may as well be used, no? Or possibly they are just turned off.
Rootax
Veteran
And still nVidia never enabled them. I agree with you in a sense that it's kind of a waste, but it is what it is. And if Nintendo is using one "big core" for the OS stuff, then I guess they have not enabled them for the Switch either. Who knows, maybe their is a bug in the big/little implantation of the X1, and nVidia never corrected it because it was not worth it ?
I'm thinking you'd have one A57 core reserved when you're up and running, and switch over to the A53 cores when the system is "off" so you could download / update / suspend to emmc on minimal power. You wouldn't use both sets at the same time.
Having to have your Switch on to download would waste playing time and battery power. Transparently suspending a game to flash when sleeping and the battery gets low would be very useful too.
Rikimaru
Veteran
Reserving A57 if you have 4 A53 is very wasteful. 4 A53 could handle any OS task.
I don't think X1 is able to use both types of core simultaneously, as Lalaland said. It seems to be one or the other.
Tkumpathenurpahl
Veteran
I think they'll focus on a node shrink soon in order to release a slim version. I've not really followed any of Nintendo's hardware releases, so I won't guess the timeframe, but I think either the slim or the next iteration will have a 1080p screen, possess docked performance when portable, and greater performance when docked.
Hopefully, somewhere along the line, they'll incorporate matchmaking etc into the console itself.
You are thinking unnintendodically
At best - 16nmFF & higher grade LPDDR4 when they're cheaper, same mobile clocks, boosted dock clock GPU.
phoenix_chipset
Regular
It is excessive, but after the Ps4 and Xb1 used 3GB+ memory and 2 full cores for the OS, I expect the worst.
If it only has 3 cores for gaming I wish Nintendo modified the cores for multithreading at least, like the 360.
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
It's not just cache coherency as that wouldn't be a really big problem if the OS A53 cores did only OS tasks and the game A57 cores did only game tasks. The latency from communicating through the system RAM shouldn't be a problem, as the data exchanged should only be user input data like button pressing. Even sound processing could be done in a dedicated A53 core in such a system.
The SoC was designed to power either the A57 module or the A53 one, and never both at the same time. The TX1's power circuitry may only be able to switch the power feed between modules, not letting them power all at the same time.
That said, as @Rikimaru said reserving a full A57 core for the OS while sitting on a functional A53 module that would sip only up to 150mW at ~400MHz would be really stupid IMO.
It does sound excessive, but it comes from the same devkit HTML document that Eurogamer has stuck to for the last months and was leaked to the general public a couple of weeks ago.
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