It shrinks very differently from other circuit elements. It requires significant investment every shrink over what is needed for the "normal" process. It's questionable if there have been enough interested parties to pay for it's development for the latest processes.
Nintendo GOing Forward.
- Thread starter Wynix
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It shrinks very differently from other circuit elements. It requires significant investment every shrink over what is needed for the "normal" process. It's questionable if there have been enough interested parties to pay for it's development for the latest processes.
Nintendo's memory setup has been a clever way to get around the need for more expensive memory that also uses a lot more power, but I think it times to move to a more traditional setup. I don't see why Nintendo would have to go with more than 2GB of GDDR5 memory for the GPU though. It seems to be enough for some pretty nice graphics cards in the PC world, and then they could go with 8GB of DDR3 main memory(lower power and very cheap).
D
Deleted member 13524
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Nintendo is terrified of using anything that has been on the market for less than 5 years.
Rikimaru
Veteran
Price and availability.
If they were to push virtual texturing in a big way, it would be enough with sufficient memory to hold frame buffers + one frame's worth of texture data. Even with some really fat G-buffers, wouldn't that be less than 128MB total at 1080P...? You'd save major on memory cost this way.
Would Nintendo ever actually DO this though? No fucking way!
It's too technical a solution. They'd just stick to traditional rendering tech and skimp on the RAM, and then scale back the ambitiousness of the texturing possible with their system.I like trolling Nintendo's technological choices as much as everybody here (it looks like that... lol ) but I think it is not really serious to expect Nintendo to vouch for a high solution for the NX.
Moore's law is over for good, newer and better lithographies are still to come out but the economics carrying their adoption will change completely, they will make sense for performances constrained devices /when you have no other choices. On top of increased performances they used to come along production cost savings, it is no longer the case.
Geeks are likely to think that everything is performance constrained but imho it is far from true. Speaking of phones for example the sad reality for hardware enthusiasts is that hardware is more than up to the task already. My wife 2 years old Moto G won't get replace till it breaks as it doesn't need to be replaced for example, it does a good job at being a smartphone. The main improvements one can make (and they are being made) is providing a better camera, for "core" hardware performance I would trade any better SoC and some resolution too for more RAM and storage. Tablets are a good example of where thing could be heading, manufacturers are starting to come back from the "retina" race mania, I considering my option for christmas and I'm seeing tablet that are a lot more balanced than they used to be (on the low end): the resolution is going down, SOC are getting better. Cheap tablets (running Kitkat, I would pass on Lollipop for a cheap unsupported product) are offering a good experience, they run smoothly most apps and games. The things scary for manufacturers is that on the websites I'm checking it seems to me that costumers are actually in line with that trend as low end devices coming from what used to be pretty unknown brands are more often than not appearing in the hot items list.
The same is happening for GPU, a bunch of GPU cards are offering appropriate performances for most existing screens. Manufacturers of various field have tried to enforce adoption of better "things" more often than not at the cost of their margins, my bet is that it is not longer really sustainable on the financial (see the low-end tablets example they are pushing more well rounded products with I would bet better margins) and they are close to the end of the rope with regard to technology too, you sink more and more money to more and more marginal improvements while you can't further raise the price your product.
People are acting as it is all fine and dandy, but there is a nasty corner ahead and people are just pretending there is not.
Moore's law is over for good, newer and better lithographies are still to come out but the economics carrying their adoption will change completely, they will make sense for performances constrained devices /when you have no other choices. On top of increased performances they used to come along production cost savings, it is no longer the case.
Geeks are likely to think that everything is performance constrained but imho it is far from true. Speaking of phones for example the sad reality for hardware enthusiasts is that hardware is more than up to the task already. My wife 2 years old Moto G won't get replace till it breaks as it doesn't need to be replaced for example, it does a good job at being a smartphone. The main improvements one can make (and they are being made) is providing a better camera, for "core" hardware performance I would trade any better SoC and some resolution too for more RAM and storage. Tablets are a good example of where thing could be heading, manufacturers are starting to come back from the "retina" race mania, I considering my option for christmas and I'm seeing tablet that are a lot more balanced than they used to be (on the low end): the resolution is going down, SOC are getting better. Cheap tablets (running Kitkat, I would pass on Lollipop for a cheap unsupported product) are offering a good experience, they run smoothly most apps and games. The things scary for manufacturers is that on the websites I'm checking it seems to me that costumers are actually in line with that trend as low end devices coming from what used to be pretty unknown brands are more often than not appearing in the hot items list.
The same is happening for GPU, a bunch of GPU cards are offering appropriate performances for most existing screens. Manufacturers of various field have tried to enforce adoption of better "things" more often than not at the cost of their margins, my bet is that it is not longer really sustainable on the financial (see the low-end tablets example they are pushing more well rounded products with I would bet better margins) and they are close to the end of the rope with regard to technology too, you sink more and more money to more and more marginal improvements while you can't further raise the price your product.
People are acting as it is all fine and dandy, but there is a nasty corner ahead and people are just pretending there is not.
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Borderline on topic, after the Mali-470 ARM outed the Cortex A35 which say a lot, IP providers will have to make the most of available cheap planar lithography, it could a little while before others approaches become economically viable for devices not blessed with high margin. By the way I believe stacking approach faces the same issues.
It is really interesting as a for years design improvements were coming along with process improvement which allowed for approach that were not necessarily economically but appeared as free. Nobody wants to be loud about the end of Moore's law and the implication (for a good reason when market realizes the implications...___ ) . For example IEEE compliance, really high precision operation on mainstream (/graphic only) GPU, etc. are not necessary and definitely not free, power constrain and Moore's law breaking are going to be a good showcase of some people genius, I expect lot of fat to be remove from existing and people to impress by the performances (relatives performances) of "what is left". There could be a trend, in the face of slowing lithography progress and rising development costs I could the emergency of IPs that do more with less (ultimately you still have to give customers decent incentives to upgrade).
Back to the console "plan" Manufacturers it seems have never really waited for IP to be there to push their product or timeline, it could be time for significant change in things are done. I'm not expecting Nintendo to do it but if they were a company to do it I believe within a year or two pretty awesome IPs that are going to offer pretty remarkable level of performances are going to available to the masses.
As I said ARN just outed the ARM A35, the A57 and A72 are good fit for the non planar lithography but it would not surprise me if they found it sensical to also out an ARM v8 version of the A17 to go hand in hand with this newly announced cores. I expect the same to be true with GPU I could see some version of the MALI-T9xx putting midgard on diet keeping the critical improvements but cutting on the burden of high precision operations, etc.
I know we geek are all about HBM or HMC or Finfet 14/16 nm lithography, X-Point flash thingy but I would want to see the best of what cheap can do. That is something one could expect a company like to be, unfortunately they lost it it seems
It is really interesting as a for years design improvements were coming along with process improvement which allowed for approach that were not necessarily economically but appeared as free. Nobody wants to be loud about the end of Moore's law and the implication (for a good reason when market realizes the implications...___ ) . For example IEEE compliance, really high precision operation on mainstream (/graphic only) GPU, etc. are not necessary and definitely not free, power constrain and Moore's law breaking are going to be a good showcase of some people genius, I expect lot of fat to be remove from existing and people to impress by the performances (relatives performances) of "what is left". There could be a trend, in the face of slowing lithography progress and rising development costs I could the emergency of IPs that do more with less (ultimately you still have to give customers decent incentives to upgrade).
Back to the console "plan" Manufacturers it seems have never really waited for IP to be there to push their product or timeline, it could be time for significant change in things are done. I'm not expecting Nintendo to do it but if they were a company to do it I believe within a year or two pretty awesome IPs that are going to offer pretty remarkable level of performances are going to available to the masses.
As I said ARN just outed the ARM A35, the A57 and A72 are good fit for the non planar lithography but it would not surprise me if they found it sensical to also out an ARM v8 version of the A17 to go hand in hand with this newly announced cores. I expect the same to be true with GPU I could see some version of the MALI-T9xx putting midgard on diet keeping the critical improvements but cutting on the burden of high precision operations, etc.
I know we geek are all about HBM or HMC or Finfet 14/16 nm lithography, X-Point flash thingy but I would want to see the best of what cheap can do. That is something one could expect a company like to be, unfortunately they lost it it seems
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Deleted member 11852
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Why the hell are Nintendo during a broadcast in the middle of my Fallout 4 playthrough? 
Hey Nintendo, people without Nintendo Wii U's have new games to play!!!
Hey Nintendo, people without Nintendo Wii U's have new games to play!!!
Yea, but I am a sucker for disappointment. I am expecting Nintendo to announced Zelda TP HD, and it will be released later this month. I was also originally expecting Pikmin 4 to be announced, and given a release date. I was expecting these two titles to be the two unannounced Wii U titles releasing this year, but now instead of Pikmin 4, I am thinking its actually Minecraft Wii U Edition with the recent PEGI ratings news. I am expecting them to showcase their holiday lineup, and then finish the show with a trailer for Zelda U. I am not expecting anything NX or mobile in this direct. I think this is strictly about promoting the upcoming Wii U and 3DS games. E3 will be all about NX, so it makes sense to try give the Wii U and 3DS one last push before they start transitioning to NX. Zelda U will likely end up being a simultaneous release on both Wii U and NX, but Nintendo will hold off until E3 before making that announcement.
D
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There would never be expectations for NX announcements, since they've been very adamant about not talking about it until 2016 (probably after 2015's end of fiscal year in March).
What they ended up announcing was.. Twilight Princess remake, the Wii U Zelda they've been teasing for 3 years will come out sometime in 2016 (maybe it'll double as a launch title for the NX, like they did with Twilight Princess), some updates to existing games, Hirule Warriors for 3DS, an Amiibo-based Animal Crossing, a new Mario Tennis and some kind of dungeon Pokemon game.
east of eastside
Newcomer
I have a feeling after Direct, that NX is 2017.. (It was always the plan.) Nintendo has enough software to string along Wii U and let it complete its 5 year cycle until then. The fact that Zelda U is '16 and hasn't been pushed off to NX only further cements that.
That puts HBM, Zen, A72, and 14/16nm FF+ back on the table in terms of realistic discussion.
Cloud in Smash basically confirms FFVII R for NX and, along with DQXI, also confirms NX is powerful enough to handle PS4 software.
AMD has bet the company on Zen, HBM, and 14/16nm chips and having Nintendo pay off this investment with its NX contract featuring this tech was part of the plan.
That puts HBM, Zen, A72, and 14/16nm FF+ back on the table in terms of realistic discussion.
Cloud in Smash basically confirms FFVII R for NX and, along with DQXI, also confirms NX is powerful enough to handle PS4 software.
AMD has bet the company on Zen, HBM, and 14/16nm chips and having Nintendo pay off this investment with its NX contract featuring this tech was part of the plan.
And then you mix in Nintendo and that removes all those items from the table and even the room the table is in.
Fourth Storm
Newcomer
I didn't see anything that made me think NX was 2017. If this were 10 years ago, maybe, but Nintendo have made clear that they are focusing on a smoother transition between gens. Besides Zelda, everything they showed was mostly 1st quarter/early second quarter stuff, unless I'm forgetting something. They don't have enough Wii U software in the pipeline for the machine to last another 2 years.
Nintendo chosen 45nm in a timeframe in wich 28nm was bleeding edge but available anyway. In a design described as thermal driven...
No it doesn't! How could it possibly confirm either of those two things?
