NV got DS2 contract according to BSN

I'm not making any assumptions on the battery life of Tegra, I'm only asking. My original assumptions on battery life were based on the PSP (I know, I forgot about the UMD). Right now, I am worried about graphics over battery life, and I hope someone can quell my fears. It's not that good graphics = bad battery life. I'm worried they're trying to appease graphic whores and forget what makes a portable great. I couldn't find anything on Tegra's battery life either.

Edit - Ok, I just found some info saying the Tegra has low power consumption. That'll put my mind at ease.

Edit 2 - While we're at it, who the heck makes the DS's GPU anyway? I've never even heard of what the GPU is called. I'm very curious.
 
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It does (from what I was told), but I have no idea what it's called. Come to think of it, I don't know what the PSP's GPU is called either. I guess they just don't make a big deal about handheld GPUs.
 
I believe it has dedicated hardware, but I'm not sure if it's a discrete component, or if it's a modification to one of its ARM cores (If memory serves me it's the latter, but I could be waaaay off).
 
Going by with nVidia's presentation about the Tegra's philosophy (consume no power unless it is absoltely justified), it does seem to line up with Nintendo's principles when it comes to handhelds (robustness, reliability), but the question of how much of it will be in actual the system still remains.

Digital Foundry also seems to support the Tegra claim with their own sources, plus Engaget's evidence analysis. Again, I wouldn't be disappointed if this new DS isn't as powerful as people initially claim it to be.
 
That consume no power unless it's absolutely justified philosophy is pretty much common ground in the SoC realm, exactly because power consumption and in extension battery life is extremely critical and is hardly Tegra exclusive.

From that point and on I'm as confident as I can be that Nintendo will be using some Tegra variant for its next generation handheld console. Of course will it most likely represent a huge stepup compared to the current DS, it's just that some of the Tegra related speculations are too exaggerated to make sense. Digital Foundry's article tries to put a cleaner perspective on the issue.

In any case it's beyond doubt a huge success for NVIDIA. Today's Nintendo DS has sold over 107Mio units and might even be more since the last time I checked. That's no potential to sneeze over and it places them as a player in the embedded market automatically by several steps higher than without it.
 
Nintendo has already had to disclose the material detriment that competition from the iPhone has had on their sales. The market opportunity will be much smaller for their next handheld.

While Nintendo's brand momentum will certainly allign a strong stable of game developers to nVidia's handheld platform initially, giving nVidia some temporary authority to influence standards within the mobile community, they've once again latched on to a falling star for the next generation "console wars", as with PS3 in the current generation.

nVidia perhaps didn't account for, in their initial RSX sales projections, Sony's misguided approach with PS3, so they hopefully wouldn't make the same mistake twice by banking on Nintendo repeating the success of the DS.
 
Lazy8s said:
While Nintendo's brand momentum will certainly allign a strong stable of game developers to nVidia's handheld platform initially, giving nVidia some temporary authority to influence standards within the mobile community, they've once again latched on to a falling star for the next generation "console wars", as with PS3 in the current generation.

nVidia perhaps didn't account for, in their initial RSX sales projections, Sony's misguided approach with PS3, so they hopefully wouldn't make the same mistake twice by banking on Nintendo repeating the success of the DS.
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Understandable given Nintendo's experiences with Sony and Philips (the initial Playstation add-on for the SNES and CD-i).

But doesn't Nintendo have a long time agreement with the ArtX team (the staff that switched from SGI to ATI now AMD)? This article shows the strong correlation between them and what would then be Nintendo's next platforms, despite being of different companies (SGI, ATI/AMD). Unless they (key people) themselves switched sides to nVidia, I'm not quite sure how they got to convince Nintendo to hand over the keys to a competing graphics supplier just like that. Was Nintendo that dissatisfied with Hollywood and Broadway?
 
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Lazy8s said:
Nintendo has already had to disclose the material detriment that competition from the iPhone has had on their sales. The market opportunity will be much smaller for their next handheld.

While Nintendo's brand momentum will certainly allign a strong stable of game developers to nVidia's handheld platform initially, giving nVidia some temporary authority to influence standards within the mobile community, they've once again latched on to a falling star for the next generation "console wars", as with PS3 in the current generation.

nVidia perhaps didn't account for, in their initial RSX sales projections, Sony's misguided approach with PS3, so they hopefully wouldn't make the same mistake twice by banking on Nintendo repeating the success of the DS.
Click to expand...


I may be ignorant of the correct information, but in what way is Nintendo a falling star in the next generation of console wars?
 
sfried said:
Understandable given Nintendo's experiences with Sony and Philips (the initial Playstation add-on for the SNES and CD-i).

But doesn't Nintendo have a long time agreement with the ArtX team (the staff that switched from SGI to ATI now AMD)? This article shows the strong correlation between them and what would then be Nintendo's next platforms, despite being of different companies (SGI, ATI/AMD). Unless they (key people) themselves switched sides to nVidia, I'm not quite sure how they got to convince Nintendo to hand over the keys to a competing graphics supplier just like that. Was Nintendo that dissatisfied with Hollywood and Broadway?
Click to expand...

The deal wasn't closed obviously yesterday; I'd dare to speculate it was roughly 3 years ago. AMD sold it's handheld team to Qualcolmm and it could be an explanation why there wasn't an agreement between the two. Now AMD has today announced under Fusion the Brazos platform which could very well be used in the handheld space but nobody knows if there ever has been any negotiation regarding handhelds between AMD and Nintendo.

ATI bought the finnish Bitboys OY IP firm, then the whole team went to AMD in order to be sold later on to Qualcolmm. It could very well be that any interesting party felt uncertain and didn't want to take any risks.

Sonic said:
I may be ignorant of the correct information, but in what way is Nintendo a falling star in the next generation of console wars?
Click to expand...

It isn't at least IMHO. Innovation doesn't always need the most capable hw available as the Wii has shown. Nintendo has won it's market share amongst other things due to their extensive lists of quality games. Any smartphone like the iPhone might cut somewhat into handheld sales, but there are not only still distinctive differences between smartphones and handhelds, Apple still has a long way to go when it comes to comparable games for handhelds.
 
Urian said:
I was writing a long post about my ideas around DS 2 but at the end I finished doing a presentation that you can find here:

http://www.slideshare.net/Urian1983/nintendo-ds-2-speculation
Click to expand...
Pretty good presentation. I'm still wondering what the Tegra chip can offer that IMG's or any other company's chip, for that matter, can't.

There's plenty of hints about Mr. Iwata going for the e-Book marketspace next, but I'm pretty sure it can't be just as simple as that (Mr. Iwata reiterates that they are an amusement company after all). And I'm pretty sure cost-effective font displays can be done even on low end devices.

If the SoC realm is all about lowest power per performance, then what's so special about Tegra compared to other processors? Ease of development?
 
sfried said:
Pretty good presentation. I'm still wondering what the Tegra chip can offer that IMG's or any other company's chip, for that matter, can't.
Click to expand...

Establishment...

I believe that if any mobile GPU company can turn an SOC into a household name it's Nvidia - I think they have the determination and the resources required to make this more than just a niche component known to web geeks, and that's incredibly important. It makes Tegra, and through association, DS2 a much more commonly understood hardware and as a result, the tools mature, the developers get their hands dirty early and Nintendo launches straight out of the gate with great titles, with incredible build quality, on a hardware that fits every requirement they need.
 
sfried said:
Pretty good presentation. I'm still wondering what the Tegra chip can offer that IMG's or any other company's chip, for that matter, can't.
Click to expand...

Would you expect all potential deals to swing into only one direction? I wouldn't and I'd even say that since it heats competition up it's the best thing that can happen to us consumers.

I'm not even sure yet if Nintendo has just licensed graphics IP from NVIDIA (albeit I'm fairly sure it must have been the initial plan) or if they ended buying an entire off the shelf SoC from NVIDIA. There must have been a middleman on the side of NVIDIA, but I think it's out of the picture by now.

If it should be the latter case Nintendo might have the disadvantage of not having full control of productions costs over the years, but that's not something the final consumer should or will bother.

If the SoC realm is all about lowest power per performance, then what's so special about Tegra compared to other processors? Ease of development?
Click to expand...
It's a competitive alternative and as Nintendo never really sets it's hw goals particularly high it does seem to fit their demands more than just fine. Now one could turn around and ask why Nintendo didn't license a single chip SGX variant instead for instance and it'll just bounce back to my first paragraph above. Or else why didn't ATI win the PS3 with SONY in the past also? Because Xenos is supposedly "inferior" to RSX?

sunscar said:
Establishment...

I believe that if any mobile GPU company can turn an SOC into a household name it's Nvidia - I think they have the determination and the resources required to make this more than just a niche component known to web geeks, and that's incredibly important. It makes Tegra, and through association, DS2 a much more commonly understood hardware and as a result, the tools mature, the developers get their hands dirty early and Nintendo launches straight out of the gate with great titles, with incredible build quality, on a hardware that fits every requirement they need.
Click to expand...

Given that GoForce was a rather mediocre headstart for NVIDIA in the embedded market I don't see any signs of establishment just yet and neither all other so far Tegra related deals, albeit of course NVIDIA's marketing department will easily turn each mouse into an elephant. I'd even dare to say that NVIDIA was in relative terms mostly absent when OpenGL_ES1.0 was defined. Of course will they get more active in many ways after the Nintendo deal, now that they have far more capable hw they can of course start growing in that market. But they're still far from claiming any major breakthrough in that market yet starting from smartphones, netbooks and Lord knows what else embedded GPUs are present in SoCs.

Talking about niche markets is nice, I just don't see NVIDIA being out of them yet and their first generation embedded GPUs were hardly anything that would have driven them outside of that "niche" it was rather some other company that worked for the current upstart.

Bears the question really why SONY on the other hand went for a "less established" IP provider with their next generation handheld.
 
Ailuros said:
Given that GoForce was a rather mediocre headstart for NVIDIA in the embedded market I don't see any signs of establishment just yet and neither all other so far Tegra related deals, albeit of course NVIDIA's marketing department will easily turn each mouse into an elephant. I'd even dare to say that NVIDIA was in relative terms mostly absent when OpenGL_ES1.0 was defined. Of course will they get more active in many ways after the Nintendo deal, now that they have far more capable hw they can of course start growing in that market. But they're still far from claiming any major breakthrough in that market yet starting from smartphones, netbooks and Lord knows what else embedded GPUs are present in SoCs.

Talking about niche markets is nice, I just don't see NVIDIA being out of them yet and their first generation embedded GPUs were hardly anything that would have driven them outside of that "niche" it was rather some other company that worked for the current upstart.

Bears the question really why SONY on the other hand went for a "less established" IP provider with their next generation handheld.
Click to expand...

Absolutely agreed - Goforce was if anything mediocre, and right now Nvidia is no more established than anyone else (quite opposite). We have a few somewhat equally small fish in the pond, but I *do* think the others have been here longer, and still haven't gotten much bigger. Nvidia on the other hand has been in this position before, and I think they know that if they wish to get as big here as they have in the discrete space, they have to provide competitive hardware and software, they have to make their hardware extremely well-known and understood, and they have to get their IP into as many devices as possible.
 
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