That's why I said competitive with them, not exceeding them. I would assume there will be some technological advancements, such as HBM memory, that could allow a processor, that while weaker on paper, performs as well or nearly as well as an older design with higher specs. I also wouldn't be surprised to see Nintendo stick with flash memory, and only have 256GB in the console. Look how often a console starts with a far smaller hard drive at the beginning of the generation than it does at the end, that tells me that the majority of the early adopters who like to go digital will inevitably have to either replace of supplement with an external hard drive at some point anyway. Nintendo has been very good with small file sizes with their own games. Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, and Splatoon are all less than 3GB. I don't think high capacity memory is needed for a console that is still going to be very Nintendo centric with its audience. If Nintendo's plan is to persuade Xbox and PlayStation gamers to play COD and Batman on their new console, I think they are in for a very uphill battle. I think maximizing what they do well, instead of trying to compete with what Sony and Microsoft does well will find success. It does make you wonder, would Wii U with a standard controller at $199 have been successful?
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That's why I said competitive with them, not exceeding them. I would assume there will be some technological advancements, such as HBM memory, that could allow a processor, that while weaker on paper, performs as well or nearly as well as an older design with higher specs. I also wouldn't be surprised to see Nintendo stick with flash memory, and only have 256GB in the console. Look how often a console starts with a far smaller hard drive at the beginning of the generation than it does at the end, that tells me that the majority of the early adopters who like to go digital will inevitably have to either replace of supplement with an external hard drive at some point anyway. Nintendo has been very good with small file sizes with their own games. Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, and Splatoon are all less than 3GB. I don't think high capacity memory is needed for a console that is still going to be very Nintendo centric with its audience. If Nintendo's plan is to persuade Xbox and PlayStation gamers to play COD and Batman on their new console, I think they are in for a very uphill battle. I think maximizing what they do well, instead of trying to compete with what Sony and Microsoft does well will find success. It does make you wonder, would Wii U with a standard controller at $199 have been successful?
If they come out with a weaker console again, why wouldn't it be a repeat of the Wii U?
What other gimmick will they have? The wand/waggle thing is old news and the tablet clearly failed.
So how will they try to cover up the weak processor and GPU? On the basis of a $200 price tag? Still not going to cut it.
What other gimmick will they have? The wand/waggle thing is old news and the tablet clearly failed.
So how will they try to cover up the weak processor and GPU? On the basis of a $200 price tag? Still not going to cut it.
Rikimaru
Veteran
Mobile GPUs really are not near PC GPUs at same theoretical peak performance.
And MS ditched mandatory HDD in 360 because of cost.
HBM is expensive. 14/16 nm is expensive. 256Gb of flash is even more expensive than 500Gb HDD.
New technology is not there yet. You can not make a better and less expensive PS4 till next gen (also die shrinks apply to PS4 too).
You can make a not so much better PS4 at same price now/in near future.
HBM is new, probably complex and expensive as I understand it. Plus you only need massive bandwidth to feed a powerful GPU. Perhaps too powerful for Nintendo/home console right now.
I know you hope Nintendo delivers some power for once and I hope they come through for you. It would push the other guys, possibly shorten the generation (if PS4 and X1 are outclassed by another console on the market they wont last as long, as the most powerful console always has the edge on a endless timeline), and be fun/interesting from a technical standpoint.
Well whatever they do, it cant be as weak as the Wii U one assumes, so it should be fun.
I still would find some hardware like Nvidia shield interesting and plausible (especially in light of the NX+android talk), 520 GFLOPS and 19 watts. It retails for $299 with a hard drive though, which could be problematically high if Nintendo delivers something similar. Nintendo could even in theory be looking at Nvidia's X1 successor which might be more like 1 teraflop.
Assuming a stationary console, it would be surprising if it wasn't a significant step up from the WiiU in hardware capabilities, for the sake of backwards compatibility/emulation/porting if nothing else. Also, it would be strange if Nintendo didn't at least want to keep the door open for present generation cross platform titles, which would imply at least somewhat better than XBoxOne hardware capabilities, and preferably a bit better than the PS4.
However, against that has to be considered comments from Miyamoto that indicate that Nintendo still prioritises small, efficient unobtrusive devices.
If we are talking a 2017 release date, you don't have to worry too much about 14/16 nm costs, at least as long as you are going to make 20 million devices or up. And I'd assume that Nintendo aims for at least such volumes for the internals of any hardware device they launch. HBM2 isn't much of a worry either since the size of the interposer would be small, you could get away with using only a single stack (256GB/s, max 8GB), and could avoid driving any off-interposer DRAM at all. The difference in cost should be negligible, assuming there aren't any specific supply shortages two years from now.
But only because it would be theoretically possible to build a PS4+ performant console APU at decent cost and power draw for launch in 2017, doesn't mean that Nintendo will do so. The best reason to believe it might happen, is because AMD has similar designs on the shelf under any circumstances, so design work/risk/cost would be minimised.
Of course they could also decide to do something completely different from what would amount to a straight tweener console. I think they will. Whether that is a Good Thing or not depends on what they come up with, of course. But YetAnotherStationaryGamingConsole roughly on par with the products that are already out there doesn't seem to fit their modus operandi.
Also this quote from Iwata:
along with the "unique concept" statements from earlier, kind of implies that we won't see a cookie cutter console.
Yup, at 14/16nm FF, you can get quite respectable performance in a narrow power envelope, at least by current yardsticks. Definitely a factor of two+ in terms of both density and performance/watt over the current console APU process, and discounting any architectural advances.
However, the above said, even less expensive and adequately performant could be something like the PS4 APU on cost optimised FinFET but with, say, just over PS4 ALU capabilities, married to a 128-bit GDDR5 interface with more efficient ROPs/compression. This depends a bit on the longevity of GDDR5 memory as a viable GPU memory product.
I disagree, PowerVR operates pretty close to Nvidia GPU on a per ALUs basic. PowerVR and Nvidia are closer to one another than Nvidia and AMD.
It is not a ceteris paribus comparison though as PowerVR GPUs are modular wrt to the feature set they support Nvidia GPUs are not, so comparing perfs per Watts and mm2 is unfair to Nvidia products (or Intel or AMD ones). Nvidia made progress in efficiency from the K1 (Kepler) to X1 (Maxwell) but PowerVR is claiming greater progress with their series 7.
PowerVR GPUs are seriously impressive, the fact that Imagination Technology is the brand of choice for Intel and Apple says a lot.
Imagination announced that the 7XT should scale up to 1.5 TFLOPS, using FP16 calculation... Still PR farts aside that is consistent with the mp16 version (GT7900) running north of 700MHz. That is some serious performances.
You could bring in high end GPU but what is the point, they burn way too much power, the GPUs in both the XB1 and the PS4 are power constrained.
Good point, indeed as you said earlier the HDD is a fixed cost, it doesn't go down. Nowadays the pace of shrinks (and costs and associated costs saving) have slown down to crawl, the room for price reduction is lessen. A HDD is significant component to price in the BOM, I agree with you.
With regard to Nintendo, I was not thinking about costs more philosophy, I can't see Nintendo allow for xx GB day one patch and all those bad practices, HDD is not responsible but it is the enabler before the standardized HDD lots of products would been delayed. That is not a path for Nintendo to pursue.
The point is that you don't need those tech to beat AMD IPs (both in perfs per mm2 and perfs per Watts) used both in the XB1 and the PS4. Now you won't cut the price in half that is for sure (and it implies that Nvidia is on board and what is saved on BOM is greater than the extra expense on IP, hence my lots of IFs in my previous posts). Again I'm far from disagreeing completely with your previous post, more I'm nitpicking.
I completely agree with that there was something absolute in the wording in your previous post I had to argue with (for the sake of it, it is a forum after all ) but I do not disagree with the core of your previous post. EDIT I read too fast I disagree obviously. For some reason mind brain introduce a much into your statement: you cannot do much better, etc. Anyway I think the extend of our disagreement is minimal.
Though I'm slightly dyslexic and tend to read too fast, I should be more careful
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That I disagree with, AMD is so close to bankrupt that I suspect its negotiating power is rather low. Nobody like low margins, AMD is no exception.
Nvidia has some serious negotiating power, that is the only difference. I don't picture the sale persons at AMD as sheeps either, simply put it is a misrepresentation of reality, they go for the most they can get too, that is their job.
As an aside the situation is pretty reversed when it comes to perfs per watts and mm2, a few years ago AMD was leading, which might impacted MSFT and Sony choices too. Another thing is the CPU side of the affair, ARM CPUs of the time may not have been fit for the job.
There is a lot more to the MSFT and Sony choice than the fake assertion that Nvidia id bully.
Rikimaru
Veteran
If nVidia is a good partner why Tegras are not everywhere?
Why N trolls Samsung with patents? They did not sue Qualcomm and ARM.
Why everything N does is proprietary and closed source?
Actually I wonder more and more if NIntendo has what it takes to manage that type of reactive community and has the structure to adapt to such a rapidly evolving market. It is a complete cultural change, from ship when it is ready to a trial / error process, listen to community, patch things often, etc.
Those practices call for a matching organization. They are actually azare of that as they teamed with an actor of that market instead of doing it themselves.
Wrt to the second part it is not true, Nintendo made a lot on the input front which in turn translated in games. Now I agree that for lots of games (including theirs) input has pretty much been standardized. There is also the matter of making money from accessories and retro gaming and all those people that enjoying that type of authentic nostalgic experience.
Some reasonable milking of their IP in the Mobile realm sounds like a pretty good idea. Now leaving the hardware realm, I disagree that would be a last resort decision, if it comes down to this the home console are still a better target.
Many reasons, costs, power consumption, etc.
Patent trolling is not exclusive to Nvidia and it is a legal matter. Nvidia is kin on defending its IP that is a good thing. We could have a discussion about how the US patent system is failed, how often it is used to patriotic ends, etc. That is not the point, it will turn into RSPC discussion fast not the place
Because more often then not it is tech or soft they use to differentiate themselves. So far their business model works and it is not an easy feat.
OPen source is also a complicated problem and more often than not it has nothing to do with kindness, RSPC type of discussion again.
There are no easy win, even breaking even is getting tough. WiiU concept failed whatever the reasons.
Nintendo has to try something else, what? One can only guess even the best actually in charge in the corporations we are discussing about.
I see no good gimmick ahead, Virtual Reality, Augmented reality? Both are not ready yet, too costly, bulky, I'm not sure gaming is the right market, etc.
Motion control has been tried extensively without success by Microsoft which dedicated engineering resources to it Nintendo can only dream off. Nintendo simple approach has been the most successful.
3D? May Nintendo will make that a standard on handheld but on TV it failed (there are good reasons for that).
It is interesting that you bring back the wand/waggle in the discussion as it clearly shows another contradiction of the WiiU: there was the Wiiu gamepad but W&W were still part of the experience. Nintendo has to decide on the primary input for their system!
The WiiU was so confusing in this regard (not too mention the costs for the costumers...). Wand, wand+nunchuck, gamepad, pro controller, plugging controllers into controller, machines producing machines... What the hell?
That doesn't not prevent sales of accessories for retro-gaming and whatever level of software BC they achieve.
Nintendo should stick with the Wii for branding. NX is just a code name. Lots of kids have grown with the Wii, it is an establish product name now.
Imo Nintendo should release a proper Wii 2.
Kids should be a primary target which command for a low price, max 199$ with a controller and a good game. It has implication for the controller too, the Wiimotes are successful with kids, more importantly it works. They need to have create a remote that reasonably doubles as a modern pad while keeping the size reasonable for kids. A nice benefit is that adult might buy another bigger version more fit to their hands.
I think it is definitely doable and Nintendo could reuse parts they use on their handhelds. They should keep the price low and for the sake of simplicity, weight, cost, etc. I would pass on integrating proper triggers and haptic feedback. Like the bigger size controller, haptic feedback / vibrations could be introduced later on /more accessories sales. I would not pass on accelerometer and gyroscope obviously.
Now to the games and so specs, whereas kids could the primary target as far as marketing is concerned, Nintendo should work at making the console a sane target for PC and "muscle" consoles ports, car analogy for the win, for the sake of making the console attractive to the crowd casually playing core games.
For storage they should have the same practice has with their handheld, ship with say a 8GB SD card that is user replaceable. No HDD.
For services they should stick to something simple and functional.Not a step forward from the PS360 and WiiU just smoothing thing up. Keeping the OS footprint low should be an important task for theirs engineers.
I also wish rumors are wrong about their partnership with AMD as it is doable now for their handheld and home console to use the same IPs and evolve hand in hand.
Overall for all its next products I wish Nintendo sticks to well rounded but pretty barebone gaming devices, no jazz.
I wish their next handheld resemble the gameboy Advance SP more than the DS. Same here: no second screen, no 3D, no jazz (at least for the first iteration), just a solid product with good specs, good input and good battery life. Nintendo wants to produce toys not glorified PC, there are some good proven toys that do not need gimmick, sometime more is less.
With regard to kids and the Wii some could say that Wii is still good enough. I think it may have been true when the WiiU launch, but now it is really old, 4K TV are coming, etc. It may be worse a try to aim at that same demographic but with a product that has a bit more potential for casuals (especially younger generation than myself ~40 which are used to higher standard).
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Rikimaru
Veteran
They should jump to Wii 4, to compete with PS4 with number at least.
And make marketing slogan Wii 4 U. That will work 4 sure.
Doesn't smaller manufacturing processes typically allow for higher clock speeds? So though the PS4/X1 will benefit in cost from the upcoming dye shrinks, but they wont likely see increases in clock speed. I also don't think the NX has to be X1 level specs to be competitive with them. Even if the GPU were only a 600-800 Glfop GPU, as long as the CPU was similar and there was at least 4GB of memory, third parties could likely port their games with relative ease to NX. The trick is really in how to transition from Wii U to NX, if NX is looking have a low starting price. Its going to look weird having your old console on store shelves at a higher price than your new product. Even if Wii U drops in price, its still going to be sitting at $199 or better when NX launches. Assuming NX is launching next year.
upnorthsox
Veteran
So to tie this in with the Nadella thread, could NX stand for Nintendo + Xbox? I know it's always been assumed that it would go the other way but there'd be a lot of sense in this. It could also be rather cheap if they were integrating with Xbox Live too which makes a ton of sense for Nintendo.
Don't speak of such wet dreams. Its a partnership that would make so much sense. In Japan, the console is still sold as a Nintendo console, but in the rest of the world, its sold as an Xbox that now has Nintendo's games exclusively. Its not going to happen, but it would instantly make both Microsoft and Nintendo more successful.
Meh 14/16nm GCN 2.0 + zen or improved puma + 8 gigs of ddr 4 would put it around the same cost as the ps4/xbox one but more powerful . Its not like the current consoles don't have faults. They are based off older tech the gpu portions have lack the compression that the r285 has let alone what the new GCN cores come with. They have terrible tessellation performance also.
Nintendo could even do a 4 gig HBM and 4 gig DDR 4 if they really wanted too. I don't see cost being extremely expensive. They should be able to offer better performance with a similar cost to the shrunk xbox one and ps4.
Rikimaru
Veteran
It stands for Not Xbox.
8 gigs of ddr 4 is worse than GDDR5. And Puma is not much better.
Hybrid memory is a big hassle. Also memory controllers occupy sizeable chunk of die.
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