If they were to stop hardware? AAA games on competing consoles possibly PC, IP milking on mobile.
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They haven't mentioned porting their IP to competing consoles. For as long as they make dedicated hardware themselves, it doesn't make much sense. And they can be expected to do that for a long time, long enough for the competitive landscape to shift, new leadership to take the helm and so on. Impossible to predict with certainty.
As far as their mobile plans go, they had quite a few things to say however. Their last yearly conference is available in English. In the Q&A (11 questions) number 4 and 10 directly adress their mobile plans. Let me quote #4:
I would like to reconfirm how serious your company is about your initiative on games for smart devices. How much management resources are you intending to shift over to this business in the future? The company has extremely able, world-class creators, and I think they could create hits in games for smart devices. In that sense, I think the best scenario would be to have the legendary Mr. Miyamoto take up the challenge of games for smart devices, and have him create something that would make people think, "This is truly Nintendo's smart device game." Mr. Kimishima, what do you think about that?
4
Kimishima:
If people are "not sure about how serious we are" about smart devices, it means that information issued from our company is not accurately conveyed, and I have to reflect on that. As we have reiterated, we want to grow smart device gaming as one of the pillars of Nintendo's revenue stream. As for shifting managerial resources in that direction, we have very capable developers who are working on development of games for smart devices, as you already know. Of course, Mr. Miyamoto, our Creative Fellow, is also supporting the business for smart devices from a company-wide perspective. To explain the level of engagement of Mr. Miyamoto, he is having specific talks with developers of games for smart devices on what would be desirable overall. In that sense, what you see from the outside may be markedly different from what we see on the inside. As I have said, we want this to be one of the pillars of our business. Our level of engagement has not lessened, so I hope you will understand that.
Doesn't leave much space for doubt that they are being serious.
Tkumpathenurpahl
Veteran
Nintendo need to stop being difficult. DVD drive in the Wii didn't play anything but Wii games, and the same was true for the WiiU's Blu-ray drive. Let people buy a license and use the device for something other than gaming.
Then comes the "but it's for gaming" argument, which is nonsense due to Netflix being on their last two consoles.
As stated above, the lack of a unified account system is also a ball ache.
The WiiU was almost great. If the tablet was a weaker version of the base station, that allowed lower fidelity versions of the same games to be played, they'd have had a portable home console. But they were too enamoured with the idea of being quirky.
Then comes the "but it's for gaming" argument, which is nonsense due to Netflix being on their last two consoles.
As stated above, the lack of a unified account system is also a ball ache.
The WiiU was almost great. If the tablet was a weaker version of the base station, that allowed lower fidelity versions of the same games to be played, they'd have had a portable home console. But they were too enamoured with the idea of being quirky.
Nintendo is all about getting huge profit with the minimum of financial investment which is why they are constantly searching for the next cheap gimmick (after DS and Wii) and target mobile market where they think quick and easy money can be made with a minimum of effort.
No long term ambition, only quick and easy short term cash.
No long term ambition, only quick and easy short term cash.
Unfortunately, the learning experience Nintendo took away from realizing there's 2 billion smart devices out there is that they should try and pump users for money as much as they possibly can with F2P bullshit and partnering with a known moneygrubbing F2P phone app software vendor.
Not exactly the best way to start out, I'd say.
It wont happen but I think ARM has the perfect set of IPs for the level of performance.
SOC makes along with mobile technology makes perfect sense for Nintendo, as UMA.
Samsung Exynos 7420 and the Kirin 950 are interesting reference point as we know the die size 78 sq.mm and the include quite few functional units Nintendo do not need. ARM has gone a long way since then.
***They iterated on the A57 with the A72, and launch a new architecture, the A73, heir of the A12 and A17, that offers more performances per Watts and sq.mm. On the X86 both Jaguar and Atom architecture have remained untouched for what it is in the mobile segment a long while.
***They also iterated on their lower power cores, from the A53 to the A35 which is now a prouder heir of the A7.
***They made also big progress with their GPUs and announced a new architecture. The Kirin 950 showcases of the progress made from the the Mali-T760 to the Mali-T880. There new GPU architecture promise a lot of improvements, both in pert per Watts and perf per sq.mm, they round it up around x1.5 from Mali-T880. It should get them in the same ballpark as Nvidia and PowerVR.
***They have new interconnect that simply look better in every way that what was deployed in this round of consoles.
***They have other IP up to date (video, encoding decoding, etc.)
***They are a suitable partner for Home and Hndheld systems, and they are going nowhere (the odds off them going off the radars anytime soon are null).
Wrapping it up I could see Nintendo well set with such a setting:
x4 A73 and X4 A35, 16 cores G71, 128 buit bus (quad channel for ARM), 4GB of LDDR4, ~50GB/s
They may have a better CPU than nowadays consoles, a system that burn a lot less power, and that is if does not compete head to head is at least up to date, leaving PS360-WiiU generation behind, and beating device as the Shield TV (bandwidth starved).
SOC makes along with mobile technology makes perfect sense for Nintendo, as UMA.
Samsung Exynos 7420 and the Kirin 950 are interesting reference point as we know the die size 78 sq.mm and the include quite few functional units Nintendo do not need. ARM has gone a long way since then.
***They iterated on the A57 with the A72, and launch a new architecture, the A73, heir of the A12 and A17, that offers more performances per Watts and sq.mm. On the X86 both Jaguar and Atom architecture have remained untouched for what it is in the mobile segment a long while.
***They also iterated on their lower power cores, from the A53 to the A35 which is now a prouder heir of the A7.
***They made also big progress with their GPUs and announced a new architecture. The Kirin 950 showcases of the progress made from the the Mali-T760 to the Mali-T880. There new GPU architecture promise a lot of improvements, both in pert per Watts and perf per sq.mm, they round it up around x1.5 from Mali-T880. It should get them in the same ballpark as Nvidia and PowerVR.
***They have new interconnect that simply look better in every way that what was deployed in this round of consoles.
***They have other IP up to date (video, encoding decoding, etc.)
***They are a suitable partner for Home and Hndheld systems, and they are going nowhere (the odds off them going off the radars anytime soon are null).
Wrapping it up I could see Nintendo well set with such a setting:
x4 A73 and X4 A35, 16 cores G71, 128 buit bus (quad channel for ARM), 4GB of LDDR4, ~50GB/s
They may have a better CPU than nowadays consoles, a system that burn a lot less power, and that is if does not compete head to head is at least up to date, leaving PS360-WiiU generation behind, and beating device as the Shield TV (bandwidth starved).
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PowerVR used to be significantly ahead of ARM graphic department but ARM seems to be closing the GAP. ARM is iterating its CPU designs a lot faster than Imagination Tech.
The ray tracing unit is pretty interesting as the acceleration it provides can serve more than graphics, but when I look at the convenience a deal with ARM and the long term implication for Nintendo ARM looks good to me.
Though I'm confident Nintendo will have gone with neither of those options, which make me SAD as whereas a as a potential customer I don't expect a system competitive with the Xb1 or the PS4 (my PC already is) though the idea of buying a fine piece of technology is appealing to me, and others suspect. It would be nice to have a clean launch, not surrended by speculation about how antiquated the system is, limiting, etc. It can be avoided without Nintendo breaking the bank.
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
Yes, Nintendo totally has the 3rd party support to release platform-exclusive games using platform-exclusive dedicated engines for real-time Ray-Tracing adoption.
If Saturn got hell for using quads, imagine how well it would go for Nintendo to adopt Ray Tracing.
/s
Except Unity could support it rather quickly, and Unreal Engine too...
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
The cost of the console will be lower and so will the margin on software. The idea of multi-gigabyte-sized game cartridges makes me go...
If 1+3 can have 6gigs of LPDDR4 ram, Nintendo can damn well go above 1 gig. Heck, even Vita had 3/4 of a gig [512ram+256vram in a crazy stack].
edit - is this stacked ram in 1+3? It is located in just a single location on a motherboard, there is just one ram package.
youtu.be/9_dEc4tq5us?t=164
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Holy all mighty! That is one crazy stack!
No wonder vita is so thick
No wonder vita is so thick
I assume you're joking.
The entire stack is only a few mm high including epoxy packaging...
its probably stacked under the screen right? one RAM chip usually about a few mm thick. if they stack those, i imagine it became substantial thickness.I assume you're joking.
or those single RAM chip is thick due to the packaging?
Yes. A fair bunch of the height of an IC package is from the PCB substrate and epoxy covering. Silicon wafers themselves are quite thinly sliced, and in stacking applications typically made thinner still (using chemical treatment or polishing.) With high bandwidth memory stacks for example, each DRAM die is only a (small) fraction of a mm thick.
The photo you see is greatly magnified, in reality the solder bumps connecting the two bottom-most layers of the stack are likely smaller than the eye can see.
There was an annotated version of the same image which I saw at some point... I wish I could find it, but trying my bad googling skills just brings me a lot of "is PS vita dead?" results.
I don't think there's anything new in this article, but it might give a few things to consider .. like how it will likely be a new gimmick to push sales. So what's the gimmick?
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/so-when-are-we-going-to-see-more-of-nintendos-nx-anyway/
Usually, when a new game console is nine months away from launch, the console maker has already softened the ground for the upcoming debut with trade show announcements, hints at exclusive games, and at least some public discussion of its technical specifications. Yet Nintendo's NX is currently nine months away from launch (if the company's current March 2017 launch roadmap is to be believed), and we still know next to nothing about "the new hardware system with a brand-new concept" that was first mentioned publicly roughly 15 months ago.
That state of affairs has left us flailing at wild, patent-based guesses about the console's design and grasping at extremely small crumbs of concrete information when they rarely appear.
Nintendo does at least have a public excuse for keeping details of the NX so secret for so long. Speaking at a Japanese investor meeting this week (as translated by Twitter user Cheesemeister), legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto said the company is "worried about imitators" if it shows off the console's new ideas too early. Miyamoto also talked about protecting those new ideas in a recent interview with the AP. "In terms of NX, there's an idea that we're working on. That's why we can't share anything at this point... If it was just a matter of following advancements in technology, things would be coming out a lot quicker."
If this kind of excuse sounds familiar, it's because Nintendo said practically the same thing back in 2004 and 2005, when the upcoming Wii was still the codenamed "Revolution." Though Nintendo showed the system at E3 those years as a non-functional black box, the company would only make vague handwaving gestures about its "revolutionary" new controller.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/so-when-are-we-going-to-see-more-of-nintendos-nx-anyway/
Usually, when a new game console is nine months away from launch, the console maker has already softened the ground for the upcoming debut with trade show announcements, hints at exclusive games, and at least some public discussion of its technical specifications. Yet Nintendo's NX is currently nine months away from launch (if the company's current March 2017 launch roadmap is to be believed), and we still know next to nothing about "the new hardware system with a brand-new concept" that was first mentioned publicly roughly 15 months ago.
That state of affairs has left us flailing at wild, patent-based guesses about the console's design and grasping at extremely small crumbs of concrete information when they rarely appear.
Nintendo does at least have a public excuse for keeping details of the NX so secret for so long. Speaking at a Japanese investor meeting this week (as translated by Twitter user Cheesemeister), legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto said the company is "worried about imitators" if it shows off the console's new ideas too early. Miyamoto also talked about protecting those new ideas in a recent interview with the AP. "In terms of NX, there's an idea that we're working on. That's why we can't share anything at this point... If it was just a matter of following advancements in technology, things would be coming out a lot quicker."
If this kind of excuse sounds familiar, it's because Nintendo said practically the same thing back in 2004 and 2005, when the upcoming Wii was still the codenamed "Revolution." Though Nintendo showed the system at E3 those years as a non-functional black box, the company would only make vague handwaving gestures about its "revolutionary" new controller.
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