Nintendo Switch Tech Speculation discussion

[Lalaland]

Yeah Surface Pro 4 or any tablet rely on the fact of the case being a large mass of metal as a part of the cooling solution. Copper heat plate or no the Switch has a much smaller volume of material in it's case for this. Combined with the case looking like it's made of plastic which is completely unsuitable as a heatsink then the idea is a non-runner before we get into Nintendo's low cost design philosophy.

Standard copper heatsink + fan is the only reliable mode of operation for a device that is running at near 100% or is off. PCs are rarely operate at max clocks when you're using them Switch will rarely operate at <100%.

I look forward to seeing it work and seeing what the noise levels are but the form of what the cooling is seems pretty straightforward from the images we have. A fan pulls air in at the base and expelled it past the heatsink at the top. Only question is how fast and loud is that fan

 

[MrFox]

It's just a trick I use to figure out the real power consumption, batteries cannot lie. 5 hours from a 39Wh battery puts surface 4 average at 7.8W total, including the screen and backlight (at least 4W for a 12").

It's a large 12" tablet, so the same consumption at the same power density would mean only 1.9W on the 6" Switch, because it has 4 times less casing area to dissipate heat that way. If we want 10W sustained while gaming it's over 5 times the power density!

Nintendo is gonna need a bigger boat.(tm)

 

[Deleted member 13524]

The Switch is so much thicker than the SP4 that it could easily have a copper plate covering the whole back, plus some fins between the fan and the exit vent.
If the copper's price is that much of a concern, then they could use aluminum and the difference in dissipation wouldn't be that big. Both the PS4 Slim and the Xbone S are cost-oriented consoles and they use aluminum fins with copper heatpipes.

Because the press kit says so?

Because the m3 in the SP4 is configured to a 7W SDP and it doesn't need a fan nor throttles, ever. The i7 version can consume up to a sustained 20W (measured in Intel XTU) and the fan handles it nicely.

What's the battery life under heavy usage on the 4?

While playing Galactic Civilizations III I'd say a little over 3 hours.
The SP4 has a screen over 2x larger than the Switch's and twice the pixel density, though.

Not even 5 hours in tablet mode I bet.
Do people really buy the SP4 to use it tablet mode though?

I use my m3 SP4 mostly in tablet mode. Web browsing, netflix, reading mangas, etc. and I get 7+ hours on a single charge easily.
My wife has the same model and she uses it as main work machine for word, excel and web browsing. She too gets up to 7 hours.

 

[orangpelupa]

My vaio tap 11 haswell i5 you series have 11watt tdp and 5 watt sdp.

It cools down using copper heatpipe to tiiiiiiny copper fins that is aired using a tiiiiiiny fan. The case is not used for cooling at all.

At 100% cpu usage while in 5 watt mode, it stays around 0.9ghz at 60 Celsius, and the fan is basically a tiny noisy hairdryer.

For switch, I think they will be using thicker and bigger fins and bigger copper plate instead of aluminum.

I mean, this device will need to run without making your hands feels too hot and without sounding too noisy.

 

[MrFox]

The i7 version can consume up to a sustained 20W (measured in Intel XTU) and the fan handles it nicely.

It still throttles significantly under sustained load, based on case temperature thresholds:
http://m.imgur.com/a/bY8YA

And even at 3 hours under heavy load (with a 39Wh battery?), subtract 4W from the 12" screen/backlight which dissipates from the screen surface itself, and we're talking about only 9W from the soc, times 60% from the specs, so the plate only dissipates an average of 5.4W on a surface area that's 4 times the switch. The plate dissipation is just a case coupling, the surface area is proportional to the wattage it can dissipate, so the same idea for the switch wouldn't handle more than 1.5W watts. It's practically useless at this size.

It only works for low power density, because the case is the heat sink, and the temperature limits of the case (dictated by comfort and/or lithium not exploding) reduces the efficiency by a huge amount compared to a proper isolated heat sink which is alowed to become hot.

 

[wco81]

I know m3 is the cheapest SP4 config but which is the most popular?

Seems like most people are going for i5 or i7 to get full PC replacements, since those configurations come with more RAM and storage as well as faster processor.

How is the battery life on those?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

And even at 3 hours under heavy load (with a 39Wh battery?), subtract 4W from the 12" screen/backlight which dissipates from the screen surface itself, and we're talking about only 9W from the soc, times 60% from the specs, so the plate only dissipates an average of 5.4W on a surface area that's 4 times the switch.

I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting the XTU is adding screen power consumption into their SoC consumption?
Or are you referring to the other part of my post that mentioned battery life while gaming (and not thermal performance!)? If so, you're mixing two completely different things, as I only mentioned it does not throttle so thermal threshold could still be far away.
Plus, the m3 is fanless, so the plate isn't dissipating 60% like that previous picture suggests, it's probably a lot more. And even then the comparison to the Switch doesn't make sense because the Switch isn't fanless.

Moreover, the Switch is a lot thicker than a SP4, so the fan can be thicker too, meaning it should push a lot more hot air than the SP4.

I know m3 is the cheapest SP4 config but which is the most popular?

Seems like most people are going for i5 or i7 to get full PC replacements, since those configurations come with more RAM and storage as well as faster processor.

How is the battery life on those?

Core i5 is the most popular AFAIK, and the battery life with it is generally 10% less than the m3 version.
The i7 is substantially more expensive because it has a GT3e GPU with 64MB eDRAM.

 

[MrFox]

I'm just saying using the case to dissipate heat on the switch is a bad idea. Can we talk about the switch instead of unrelated giant tablets?

 

[eastmen]

I'm just saying using the case to dissipate heat on the switch is a bad idea. Can we talk about the switch instead of unrelated giant tablets?

we were speculating about cooling were we not. So I brought up an example of a cooling system that uses more than just a tiny heatsink and fan. Of course since it was MS you went off on a tangent . The back of the tablet getting warm wouldn't be a big issue in full on game mode because your holding onto the joy cons and not the back of the tablet.

The tergra tablet has a magnesium thermal shield intergrated into the frame.

 

[McHuj]

Surprise, Surprise

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nintendo-switch-spec-analysis


CPU: 1GHz both docked and undocked
GPU: 768MHz docked, 307 MHz portable

 

[Picao84]

Surprise, Surprise

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nintendo-switch-spec-analysis


CPU: 1GHz both docked and undocked
GPU: 768MHz docked, 307 MHz portable

If true, this is a disaster waiting to happen.

 

[function]

I hope no-one is going to pretend to be surprised.

CPU was always going to limited to low consumption mobile power draw. GPU clocks perfectly fit 720 -> 1080 jump in resolution too.

Edit: 20 nm still?

 

[Lalaland]

It seems Nintendo have simply said 720p is ~40% of the pixel count of 1080p so we'll downclock the GPU to 40% of docked speed for on the go. From reading the article I wouldn't be surprised if the X1 customisations were simply to excise the vestigial A53 cores that standard Tegra X1 had. They were always an odd idea, didn't help Tegra's terrible power consumption numbers by much and their removal here clearly signals Nintendo doesn't see the point either (or vanilla Tegra X1 battery was a lot worse than I imagined).

It all seems pretty straight forward thus far with Nintendo continuing to have a strong cost focus which is key if you're not planning on leading with 'teh grafix' for your platform. The only potential stone in the shoe is the comment that devs may find this 'simple' downclock to be far more complex to deal with. I've heard a few folks over the past few weeks on podcasts discussing mutterings that Switch was more complex than they had anticipated and variable GPU clocks might be what they were referring to. Anyone who has any experience of GPU code care to chime in?

I actually feel the article is a bit unfair to Nintendo by not pointing out a number of key points about Nvidia and Tegra, namely that the base chip ran too hot which is why Nvidia were the only significant customer for the damn thing. In particular the last paragraph with it's reference to Tegra X2 higher base clocks and CUDA core count makes it sound as if Nvidia has a monster available just waiting in the wings. The fact of the matter is no one is buying Tegra X2 because like all Nvidia ARM chips it runs too damn hot, all those boasts of their graphics prowess are there to cover up the lousy energy efficiency which makes them bad at being 'mobile'. It's why they bang on about in car entertainment / machine learning as they need a whole damn internal combustion engine to keep them going!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I feel a little sorry for the optimists who are on the receiving end of this violent tug towards realism (pessimism) that us already in 'dontexpectmuchland' had years ago from many products and technologies. At the end of the day though, life is 90+% predictable in terms of never being the best you can hope for. All the talk of cooling and docking overdrives and fans, it's simply a case of battery life. Docked, limitless electricity available, clock at cool-and-low-powered. Portable, with only a battery, and clock at 'anaemic console' level because, as said repeatedly, it's a mobile device. Switch is thus a mobile device with TV out, for sure, and nothing like a good console alternative. No sophisticated GPU-housing dock or anything of the sort; just the most primitive solution to the job of portable, dockable gaming device possible.

Makes you wonder what we, the Internet Gestalt, would actually accomplish if our design ideas were put into practice? Would our visions of amazing mobile cooling solutions and sophisticated docks take the world by storm, or would we quickly be bankrupted with over-engineered products no-one really wants?

As for Switch's future, significant ports seem far less likely now. CPU power isn't there and graphics will need special attention. Unless it sells in crazy numbers I can see devs giving it a bit of a wide berth.

 

[Lalaland]

...
Makes you wonder what we, the Internet Gestalt, would actually accomplish if our design ideas were put into practice? Would our visions of amazing mobile cooling solutions and sophisticated docks take the world by storm, or would we quickly be bankrupted with over-engineered products no-one really wants?
...

Put me on Team B, a few years of commercial experience wherein I lost tenders where we offered 40% faster for 5% more rapidly taught me that no faster is not always better. Nintendo ruthlessly targets the only part of their business that makes money for them the handhelds and I believe doing otherwise would have been commercial suicide. Nvidia's stuff is overclocked and overpowered for mobile parts so taking an axe to them to provide decent battery life was the only option, from the very moment we knew this was an Nvidia part this was my belief. I think a lot of people who were expecting "XB1 in the home, PS360 on the go" were working from a PC frame of reference where Nvidia led for years by burning watts like they were going out of fashion and from the frankly grossly disingenuous stage presentations on the power of Tegra.

I'm curious as to how the idea that x86 -> ARM was going to be trivial for multi-platform devs to overcome ever came to have currency, even if this was a full speed Tegra x2 it was always going to require a large dedicated Switch team just for the CPU code.

 

[Rodéric]

It's rather cutting edge tech really, has Tegra Parker/X2 even been tapped out yet ?
Noone sane was expecting much better, the clock change makes sense, the only question was whether it's X1 or X2, things point strongly at X1 and the other question was what the customization were, and we don't know about that yet.
(Likely useless cores removal, maybe smaller process...)
Nothing disappointing at all, it's nice, and I think the goal was not to match desktop PC/consoles in a handheld, because that makes no sense, neither from heat dissipation nor battery life perspective.

My understanding is that the tools (compiler, API) are on par with competing platform, which is a good step forward coming from Nintendo ^^

 

[Newguy]

I wasn't expecting much and I'm still disappointed.

 

[McHuj]

It seems Nintendo have simply said 720p is ~40% of the pixel count of 1080p so we'll downclock the GPU to 40% of docked speed for on the go. From reading the article I wouldn't be surprised if the X1 customisations were simply to excise the vestigial A53 cores that standard Tegra X1 had. They were always an odd idea, didn't help Tegra's terrible power consumption numbers by much and their removal here clearly signals Nintendo doesn't see the point either (or vanilla Tegra X1 battery was a lot worse than I imagined).!

It would not surprise me if Nintendo went the other way, removed the a57's in favor of more a53 cores.

And 28nm will not be a surprise.

 

[BRiT]

Now its just a matter of time before the other shoe falls, the price Nintendo is going to charge for the NX Switch with ALL hardware shown included.

 

[Niebotskick]

Remember back when Nvidia said "Porting PS4, Xbox One, and PC games to Nintendo Switch is simple."

Yeah, simple my arse.