Nintendo Switch Tech Speculation discussion

[Syferz]

It's not an entirely serious position, but it's still a valid one. Where there's clear precedent and little reason to think there's something to change from this precedent (like a change of board members), then there's good chance the precedent will continue, no? Nintendo's corporate philosophy has been "lateral thinking with withered technology" - is there reason to think that has changed? Perhaps, noting their dwindling importance, they are trying something new.

In this discussion trying to guess what NS's hardware will be, precedent following N. corporate philosophy is very much a legitimate consideration.
I didn't say impossible. It's definitely possible. I said it's implausible.

Every console you have referenced is based on a device that was designed starting in 1999. NS isn't backwards compatible, it isn't an AMD device, it virtually has to have 500gflops+ when docked as it has active cooling, there is a laundry list of reasons that your position is wrong, it isn't implausible, the opposite is actually true. It is implausible that this device doesn't hit the minimum specs of Tegra Shield TV from 2015, with a better memory solution as that is where Nintendo spends its money on dedicated devices and given how cheap X1 must be now, that leaves plenty of room for embedded ram or faster solutions like LPDDR4 with decent bandwidth.

If you are going to hang your hat on Nintendo's hardware history, first you have to take in the facts (X1 was used in the devkit and NS is actively cooled) and then go down your history lesson to realize that memory bandwidth is rarely an issue with Nintendo, the last home console to have memory bandwidth issues from Nintendo was 20 years ago in the N64, and all the management has changed since then.

 

[N00b]

This to me is why we know N. won't be doing that. Not at all technical, but when do Nintendo put fastest-ever hardware in their devices? Do we really believe that Nintendo's mobile device will be topping the chart above, eclipsing the iPad Pro and Pixel C and being the world's most powerful portable device?

I disagree. You still party like it 2012, but the situation has changed dramatically since then. First semiconductor has evolved and has become better at handling new processes and custom designs. Second mobile phones are catching up fast. Every year the big boys release new, better hardware. Remember the Apple game console rumor? Apple or Samsung might release phones that can be docked to the TV in order to watch stuff or play games as early as next year or the year after. That's a real threat to Nintendo and their business model. If Nintendo is bringing 2015 hardware to the 2017 table they might hurt their prospects in the process. 2012 the gaming hardware market was just a club of three (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).

 

[Syferz]

I disagree. You still party like it 2012, but the situation has changed dramatically since then. First semiconductor has evolved and has become better at handling new processes and custom designs. Second mobile phones are catching up fast. Every year the big boys release new, better hardware. Remember the Apple game console rumor? Apple or Samsung might release phones that can be docked to the TV in order to watch stuff or play games as early as next year or the year after. That's a real threat to Nintendo and their business model. If Nintendo is bringing 2015 hardware to the 2017 table they might hurt their prospects in the process. 2012 the gaming hardware market was just a club of three (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).

It won't just hurt Nintendo, if Switch is successful, Apple will almost certainly sell iPhone 8 or 9 with a dock that plugs into your TV and offers 1080p 60fps PS4 quality or better, I mean 7nm isn't far away at all, developers chasing that 1B+ gaming market? you better believe CoD, Madden, 2K and every other yearly franchise will be on the app store / Google Play. Vulkan opened the door, and Sony/Microsoft put their foot in the door when they chased VR and 4K gaming, the majority of gamers will never care about these things and if they can game at 1080p 60fps with current gen graphics and those graphics being upgraded every 2 years? How does console gaming stand a chance if their selling point is multiplats?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It is implausible that this device doesn't hit the minimum specs of Tegra Shield TV from 2015

I agree that Shield TV specs are reasonable. That's not the same as nVidia's bleeding-edge, untested design that'd top that chart.

with a better memory solution as that is where Nintendo spends its money on dedicated devices and given how cheap X1 must be now, that leaves plenty of room for embedded ram or faster solutions like LPDDR4 with decent bandwidth.

LPDDR4 gives us 25.6 GB/s which is what the rumoured SDK spec is. Extremely likely. A custom Tegra processor with eDRAM or something is far less likely.

I disagree. You still party like it 2012, but the situation has changed dramatically since then. First semiconductor has evolved and has become better at handling new processes and custom designs. Second mobile phones are catching up fast. Every year the big boys release new, better hardware. Remember the Apple game console rumor? Apple or Samsung might release phones that can be docked to the TV in order to watch stuff or play games as early as next year or the year after. That's a real threat to Nintendo and their business model. If Nintendo is bringing 2015 hardware to the 2017 table they might hurt their prospects in the process. 2012 the gaming hardware market was just a club of three (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).

How does that change Nintendo's position? They've always faced high-tech challenges but been content to stick with their own philosophy regardless. Is there any evidence of N. taking on a different corporate philosophy and going for a bleeding edge solution this time?

It might happen, but at this point it's pure, uncorroborated conjecture - Nintendo has had a complete change of heart and is now working on bleeding-edge, untested hardware, leading to the design of NS that'll top the benchmark charts. There's certainly reason for Nintendo to change, and there is the possibility. Maybe the reason NS is 'late' is because they changed plan and decided to go with a latest tech from nVidia? Is there any real evidence though?

 

[BrainCraters]

It's not an entirely serious position, but it's still a valid one. Where there's clear precedent and little reason to think there's something to change from this precedent (like a change of board members), then there's good chance the precedent will continue, no? Nintendo's corporate philosophy has been "lateral thinking with withered technology" - is there reason to think that has changed? Perhaps, noting their dwindling importance, they are trying something new.

In this discussion trying to guess what NS's hardware will be, precedent following N. corporate philosophy is very much a legitimate consideration.
I didn't say impossible. It's definitely possible. I said it's implausible.

Were any of the other portables being discussed here designed to have a dedicated dock mode with active cooling to effectively double as a home console though? Not trying to say this is some sort of ultimate trump feature (maybe its just a simple upscaler), but it definitely seems worth mentioning. This sorta goes hand in hand with that, but I doubt those other portables were seriously considered to be able to port any meaningful number of aaa or even aa console titles to them as well. Just a thought.

Here's another. I totally get the counter that "its nintendo" in terms of how powerful we should expect this thing to be, but...

Three things.

The Wii sold 100 million+. The Wii U sold sub 15 mil. C'mon. They literally went from their best selling home conole to their absolute worst. Even if we knew NOTHING about their next console, imo theres nothing fanboyishly naive in thinking there's a great chance they'd take their next console in a sharply different direction. On the contrary, I think theyd be stupid NOT to (though it hasn't stopped them before!). Dont you? Doesnt necessarily mean they'd automatically make a super duper 6 tp beast, but everyone agrees there. I guess I'd just be cautious how much weight I'd give to the past exploits of a company as an ironclad way to predict the future when their last flagship endeavor utilizing past philosophies failed so undeniably, historically terribly. If thats not enough to wake a company up and sharply change course, I don't know what is.

Second point. Have they not already ably demonstrated how heretofore UN-Nintendo like they've been acting with this thing? I mean, forgot about comparing this to the xbox one, think of this coming from the 3DS for a second. It may well be the largest generational leap from any of the Big 3's consoles ever, let alone just talking about Nintendo. If I was a handheld only guy I'd be sh*tting bricks over this thing.

They've (thankfully) dumped bc and along with it the ancient 15 year old architecture that hamstrung it graphically. Brand new architecture and modern tools with thebenefit of NVidia's expertise with those two respective things.

 

[bunnybug]

Were any of the other portables being discussed here designed to have a dedicated dock mode with active cooling to effectively double as a home console though? Not trying to say this is some sort of ultimate trump feature (maybe its just a simple upscaler), but it definitely seems worth mentioning. This sorta goes hand in hand with that, but I doubt those other portables were seriously considered to be able to port any meaningful number of aaa or even aa console titles to them as well. Just a thought.

Here's another. I totally get the counter that "its nintendo" in terms of how powerful we should expect this thing to be, but...

Three things.

The Wii sold 100 million+. The Wii U sold sub 15 mil. C'mon. They literally went from their best selling home conole to their absolute worst. Even if we knew NOTHING about their next console, imo theres nothing fanboyishly naive in thinking there's a great chance they'd take their next console in a sharply different direction. On the contrary, I think theyd be stupid NOT to (though it hasn't stopped them before!). Dont you? Doesnt necessarily mean they'd automatically make a super duper 6 tp beast, but everyone agrees there. I guess I'd just be cautious how much weight I'd give to the past exploits of a company as an ironclad way to predict the future when their last flagship endeavor utilizing past philosophies failed so undeniably, historically terribly. If thats not enough to wake a company up and sharply change course, I don't know what is.

Second point. Have they not already ably demonstrated how heretofore UN-Nintendo like they've been acting with this thing? I mean, forgot about comparing this to the xbox one, think of this coming from the 3DS for a second. It may well be the largest generational leap from any of the Big 3's consoles ever, let alone just talking about Nintendo. If I was a handheld only guy I'd be sh*tting bricks over this thing.

They've (thankfully) dumped bc and along with it the ancient 15 year old architecture that hamstrung it graphically. Brand new architecture and modern tools with thebenefit of NVidia's expertise with those two respective things.

the fact that there making a portable shows that they haven't changed there philosophy, yes it can be docked and connected to a tv, but it still the main focus is being portable, which is understandable since thats where most of there sales are coming from. it's not about power other wise they would have a made a powerful console and a 3ds successor, they could have easily had both games run on both hardware, just look at 3ds and wiiu ports for example, Nintendo made the only choice they can, combine there user base as best as possible, at reasonable price, and hope they can have a hit with the mainstream, it's not about power, they don't believe in that, it's about being different.

 

[N00b]

How does that change Nintendo's position? They've always faced high-tech challenges but been content to stick with their own philosophy regardless. Is there any evidence of N. taking on a different corporate philosophy and going for a bleeding edge solution this time?

It changes Nintendo's position because Wii U was not very successful and competition has become stronger. If they want to keep their hardware business they need to step up.

It might happen, but at this point it's pure, uncorroborated conjecture - Nintendo has had a complete change of heart and is now working on bleeding-edge, untested hardware, leading to the design of NS that'll top the benchmark charts. There's certainly reason for Nintendo to change, and there is the possibility. Maybe the reason NS is 'late' is because they changed plan and decided to go with a latest tech from nVidia? Is there any real evidence though?

My bad. It thought this was a speculation thread.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

On the contrary, I think theyd be stupid NOT to (though it hasn't stopped them before!). Dont you?

Yes. But "(though it hasn't stopped them before!)". Nintendo has done many things I consider stupid and just because I think they should be going for awesome power, doesn't make it any more likely.

If thats not enough to wake a company up and sharply change course, I don't know what is.

That's the question. Is this enough? Everything I've heard about Nintendo says 'possibly not'. I guess the first glimpses of targeting mobile means they are changing a bit.

They've (thankfully) dumped bc and along with it the ancient 15 year old architecture that hamstrung it graphically. Brand new architecture and modern tools with thebenefit of NVidia's expertise with those two respective things.

Nintendo supported past handheld BC by including the old hardware, I thought? DS design was a break from GBA, and 3DS was a break from DS, no? So in handheld terms this isn't anything different from usual behaviour, except embracing a bit of modern design philosophy.

 

[Syferz]

I agree that Shield TV specs are reasonable. That's not the same as nVidia's bleeding-edge, untested design that'd top that chart.

LPDDR4 gives us 25.6 GB/s which is what the rumoured SDK spec is. Extremely likely. A custom Tegra processor with eDRAM or something is far less likely.

How does that change Nintendo's position? They've always faced high-tech challenges but been content to stick with their own philosophy regardless. Is there any evidence of N. taking on a different corporate philosophy and going for a bleeding edge solution this time?

It might happen, but at this point it's pure, uncorroborated conjecture - Nintendo has had a complete change of heart and is now working on bleeding-edge, untested hardware, leading to the design of NS that'll top the benchmark charts. There's certainly reason for Nintendo to change, and there is the possibility. Maybe the reason NS is 'late' is because they changed plan and decided to go with a latest tech from nVidia? Is there any real evidence though?

Nvidia Shield TV specs are the minimum specs this device can realistically have considering it is Actively cooled when docked, just like the Shield TV, and that Pixel C was passively cooled in about half the area in a closed system (no vents, in which NS has 2) and ran X1 at 850mhz for 435GFLOPs.

25.6 GB/s is extremely likely? hasn't Nintendo always had custom memory with high bandwidth in their devices? even the 3DS has 6MB of VRAM and rare FCRAM because it is faster than most other memory options in early 2011. You aren't looking at Nintendo's history, you are just low balling because it feels better to you, but at least you understand that X1 is basically the bare minimum here.

Nintendo supported past handheld BC by including the old hardware, I thought? DS design was a break from GBA, and 3DS was a break from DS, no? So in handheld terms this isn't anything different from usual behaviour, except embracing a bit of modern design philosophy.

What do you mean? it's already been confirmed by Nintendo that NS doesn't play 3DS games.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It changes Nintendo's position because Wii U was not very successful and competition has become stronger. If they want to keep their hardware business they need to step up.
My bad. It thought this was a speculation thread.

It is. People are presenting their theories and arguing for/against them.

 

[sebbbi]

LPDDR4 gives us 25.6 GB/s which is what the rumoured SDK spec is. Extremely likely. A custom Tegra processor with eDRAM or something is far less likely.

Could also be simply quad channel memory bus like iPad Pro (51.2 GB/s). Xbox One also sported a quad channel DDR3 controller (only Xeon's had similar DDR memory bandwidth on PC).

 

[bunnybug]

I find it funny after 2 generations of getting the worst possible scenerio in specs coming true in Nintendo hardware, people believe Nintendo will be cutting edge with switch, ok good luck with that.

 

[Syferz]

LPDDR4 gives us 25.6 GB/s which is what the rumoured SDK spec is. Extremely likely. A custom Tegra processor with eDRAM or something is far less likely.

Wasn't this "rumored spec" an anon paste bin posted online, a hour after the preview trailer for Switch went live? What is the source? why should anyone believe it when all they did was dump X1 specs even though Nvidia is claiming officially that it is a custom Tegra part?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't remember the specifics of the rumour or the source. I didn't think it was 'anonymous' but someone with a reputation Tweeting it. Eurogamer certainly repeated the specs (X1, maybe X2), and though I doubt journalistic integrity on the whole and recognise gaming media likes to parrot whatever noises are made, EG does a little better in independently confirming rumours.

 

[Syferz]

I don't remember the specifics of the rumour or the source. I didn't think it was 'anonymous' but someone with a reputation Tweeting it. Eurogamer certainly repeated the specs (X1, maybe X2), and though I doubt journalistic integrity on the whole and recognise gaming media likes to parrot whatever noises are made, EG does a little better in independently confirming rumours.

Eurogamer didn't confirm any specs for NS, just that the dev kits had X1 in them. "Nintendo Switch is being powered by a custom Nvidia mobile Tegra processor, with development kits using the X1 chip that's already in use for the Shield Android TV console and the Google Pixel C tablet." -Eurogamer 2 days after these rumored specs were put up, and Nintendo Switch was revealed. The specs are clearly just X1, which is what the dev kits had in them. Doesn't seem like Eurogamer is throwing any support behind an anon pastebin dump.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes. I said "LPDDR4 gives us 25.6 GB/s which is what the rumoured SDK spec is." I don't recall any pastebin specs and was talking about the SDK, which may not represent the final hardware.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Could also be simply quad channel memory bus like iPad Pro (51.2 GB/s).

And Tegra X2 / Parker.

I for one don't believe Nintendo would go for an old and off-the-shelf Tegra X1. Those "rumored specs" are simply a dump of TX1's specs, which is an already old chip built on an unpopular process (20nm TSMC) that currently no IHV seems to want for anything except NAND chips.

8GB of LPDDR4 with a Parker would make it a beast and quite a pleasant surprise for a handheld IMO.

 

[BRiT]

I believe Nintendo will go for whatever part is a reasonable price that can have 3 hours of battery life when mobile. Do you believe the price difference to third parties is such that Parker becomes the obvious choice?

 

[Syferz]

Yes. I said "LPDDR4 gives us 25.6 GB/s which is what the rumoured SDK spec is." I don't recall any pastebin specs and was talking about the SDK, which may not represent the final hardware.

Another thought I just had, we heard that the final dev kits were shipped to 3rd parties only recently and have been on software dev kits (SDKs like you technically mention, though I assume you meant hardware DEVKITs) If it was just X1 chips, why would it take so long? summer is when Pascal Tegra became available right? that timeline makes a whole lot more sense to be perfectly honest.

Also if this was Nvidia working with any other partner, I doubt there would even be a discussion about which chip is being used. It's sort of silly IMO, we can't confirm it, but it is likely Pascal, or at the very least not on 20nm which is almost the same thing anyways.

I believe Nintendo will go for whatever part is a reasonable price that can have 3 hours of battery life when mobile. Do you believe the price difference to third parties is such that Parker becomes the obvious choice?

Considering that if they were targeting just X1 specs, yes Parker would become the obvious choice because you could drop Active cooling, Active cooling being there likely means that not only did they move to Parker, but that they increased the clocks from X1 specs. Also it solves Nintendo's issues with needing large bandwidth, as Parker is 50GB/s.

 

[function]

Running into the final 5 months before games go gold, having development kits with only half memory bandwidth would not be optimal. MS and Sony were shipping development kits far closer to final unit performance this close to launch. Unless, of course, 25 GB/s is indeed the final figure.

Nintendo have traditionally been waiting on software rather than hardware to be ready for launch.

Looking back to last year, it appears that cost per transistor was speculated to be cheaper on 20 nm than 16 nm (http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1326937). For a company willing to sign a long term contract there may be some good deals to be had on an older process such as 20 nm.

For WiiU, Nintendo went with Renesas 45 nm for the GPU when IBM had a newer 32nm edram capable process (which MS utilised for their final 360 shrink) and IBM 45 nm for their CPU when IBM were rolling their own Power processors on 32 nm. Presumably, it was cheaper to Nintendo to shop around for old nodes than go with an all-IBM SoC.