would you say Nintendo "got Nvidia'd?"
In the sense they got a nvidia SoC in their console, yes.
In the sense they got old tech for their console like the PS3 before them, also yes. But getting old tech is a recurrent thing in Nintendo. I think there's little chance it was nvidia tricking them into buying the old tech but rather Nintendo execs telling their engineers "
here's a niquel, go buy a SoC for our next console. I'm expecting you to bring some change back or you're out of a job".
That new TX1 Shield Console that was submitted to the FCC back in June 2016 might be some poison Nintendo wasn't counting on, though. If it's ever released, that is.
Imagine nvidia launching that handheld at Shield TV clocks and a $250 cost, together with renewed efforts to bring more AAA ports to Android using Vulkan.
Or better yet, postpone that handheld for another couple of months and use a TX2 instead with 8GB RAM. Now
that would be a blast of a scene to watch.
"Hey Nintendo's console is great and all, but here's our own console that is much cheaper, much more powerful and capable of playing multiplatform games".
This is good news though, at one point they might allow the smaller cores to be used; for a Tetris type game maybe so that you have 30 mins of extra playtime or something
If it was an actual custom version then maybe. Not being one, it's practically impossible. The inter-module connect in TX1 allows for one module to connect at each time, so it's either the A53 cores or the A57.
No, and you're being childish pursuing that concept and should lay it to rest (certainly at B3D).
A rather harsh accusation given how the very next sentence practically proved he was kidding, don't you think?
Nintendo probably goes for proven, reliable designs though.
'THe custom Tegra processor,' definitive article. Not 'a custom Tegra processor,' but the one and only one. And 'custom' in this context could very much mean nVidia's custom-made part for their purposes of high-end mobile gaming, being used in another product.
Next level after this will be people defending nvidia's use of "custom" in the description because there's a "custom name" printed in the chip, so that totally makes it a custom chip.
Just face it: the "custom" word in their blog post was there to mislead people into thinking it would be something other than nvidia's 2 year-old existing chip. Nothing else.
The fact that you have had to highlight the damned pronouns and do a semantics analysis to try to excuse the word "custom" just proves as much.
Seriously though, your right, the writing has been on the wall for quite some time now, and its honestly good to see it put to rest. It was really the Shield Console that was throwing me for a loop. The assumption that a small device like the Shield TV was running max clocks and the Switch , albeit a smaller device, was going to require such significant downclocks seemed unlikely. However, as soon as the user over at Gaf ran test confirming that the Shield TV does in fact throttle up and down, things started to make more sense. When you account for hardware utilization being far superior on Switch compared to Shield TV, and CPU clocks being limited to portable mode, it really did come together. This is what the TX1 is capable of in the form factor that is Switch.
