Nvidia annnounces Shield Android console at GDC

[Shifty Geezer]

Going by pure GPU flops, XB1 is 1.2 TF and nVidia Tegra X1 is 0.5 TFlops. So potentially a couple of years if mobile tech continues progressing. However, in other areas like BW, mobile is way behind. X1 has 25.6 GB/s BW, versus XB1's 68 GB/s just of RAM ignoring ESRAM, and >150 GB/s BW to both XB1 and PS4 in general terms. So where flops may catch up, bandwidth is going to be severely impaired on mobile. As long as the power has to be kept low, it's inevitable that mobile won't be as fast as consoles ever.

The issue becomes one of how fast is fast enough, as Joker will say.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Memory bandwidth is being addressed through Wide I/O, HMC and HBM.
HBM will come in a consumer product in a couple of months. Wide I/O might be 2016's new standard for smartphone/tablet SoCs.

I'll throw 2018 with 10nm as a definite year where at least tablet-centered SoCs (e.g. current Tegra line) to match the consoles in memory bandwidth and surpass them in compute power.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I'll throw 2018 with 10nm as a definite year where at least tablet-centered SoCs (e.g. current Tegra line) to match the consoles in memory bandwidth and surpass them in compute power.

This seems reasonable based on previous advances and accepting some new technologies are a little unpredictable. In 2018 the current gen consoles will be five years old, though. We could be close to the next generation which should also benefit from all of those same technical advantages without being constrained by size or power of heat. This will likely always keep home consoles just beyond mobile technologies unless there is a true breakthrough in battery and IC thermal management.

 

[Karamazov]

if we could already have a GTA5 at ps360 level on a tablet i would be happy enough, the other problem of these machines is the budget allocated to the games developped for, it's not going to be the same à AAA console games anytime soon.

 

[McHuj]

I think it will take a long time for a mobile SOC in an actual mobile device tech to surpass PS4's graphic capability. This tegra chip, while designed for mobile, isn't acting like a mobile chip in the Shield console. Running off an external power source and having a more friendly form factor for heat dissipation helps a lot. I doubt this SOC would look as capable against the 360 if it were to be confined to a 2-4W cell phone usage scenario.

With power scaling advantages of shrinking process nodes diminishing, I doubt we'll see the same kind of gains in compute power of mobile devices in the next decade as we saw in the previous. We'll need some sort of disruptive technology to increase power efficiency first.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Totally relevant for this thread:

http://9gag.com/gag/aNZgyg0

 

[sebbbi]

Discussions about mobile devices catching the consoles are nothing new. I remember that certain mobile chip manufacturer said a few years ago that their next SOC will match PS3 and Xbox 360 in performance (their marketing slides even had a image of the Xbox 360). It's true that the theoretical FLOPS numbers are already higher than the last generation equivalents, however there are two problems with those numbers.

First problem is of course bandwidth. Tegra X1 is the first SOC to match PS3 in theoretical bandwidth, but Xbox 360 main memory + EDRAM bandwidth is still ahead. However Tegra features sophisticated bandwidth saving techniques (big L1/L2 caches, color + depth compression, improved hi-z). PowerVR chips (Apple devices) also have TBDR to save some additional color RT and depth RT bandwidth. So in reality the new mobile devices actually have better bandwidth than the last gen consoles.

The second problem is a bigger one. TDP. If you have looked at mobile device stress tests (for example Anandtech), you have noticed that all phones throttle badly after just a couple of minutes of heavy usage. Tablets also throttle. Even the iPad Air and iPad Air 2 throttle quite a bit under stress. Small tablets such as the iPad mini throttle more than big tablets (but less than phones).

AAA games are designed to utilize the hardware fully, including both the GPU and all the CPU cores. The stress tests used by the mobile device reviewers rarely even utilize all the CPU cores fully, and it is generally very hard to utilize the GPU fully with the heavy driver overhead of the current OpenGL ES implementations. A real AAA game using a console style low level GPU API (such as Vulkan) would throttle even more. Throttling is unacceptable for games (unless the game contains very short <1 minute levels and long waiting times between the levels). The game developer would have to leave quite a big chunk of the CPU and GPU cycles unused (and lock the frame rate to 30) to guarantee that the performance stays good for longer game sessions.

This said, I would guess that the Tegra X1 (on tablets and big phones) is pretty much on par with current generation consoles in sustained performance in AAA games. The Tegra X1 based SHIELD Console would of course be faster, since it is connected to the wall and it has ample cooling. The performance difference in AAA games would likely be bigger than most expect.

 

[Deleted member 2197]

Nvidia Confirms Shield Pro-console with 500GB

An Nvidia employee has confirmed a Pro edition of Nvidia's streaming Shield Console, to be released in May close to Computex. The console will come with Android TV in the Pro as a normal version with Tegra X1-soc.

The Pro edition will get 500GB version has been confirmed by ManuelG, an Nvidia employee active here on our forums. It's also noted that the console will support Netflix, and if it can do Ultra HD that will come in handy for a lot of people. The regular Shield console will get 16GB of NAND capacity. The Pro version was rumored after it appeared and disappeared real fast on amazon.

You should not expect any further differences other than storage capacity in-between the regular and Pro model. As stated both streaming consoles will run Android TV and work with the GRID streaming service. These boxes will get a Tegra X1 soc with four Cortex A57 and four Cortex A53 cores. The embedded GPU is Maxwell based with two smm units and a total of 256 stream/cuda/shader processors.

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/nvidia-confirms-shield-pro-console-with-500gb.html

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Huzzah! Another Android console!

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Wake me up when they actually make one that provides genuine competition tech-wise to the latest consoles... unless it's just before they're going to be replaced. Then I don't care and the cycle begins again.

 

[Arwin]

I'm mostly interested in how well it streams, controller support for streaming, latency etc.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Huzzah! Another Android console!

It's no longer a console. At least Nvidia are no longer marketing it as a console. It is now being marketed as a TV box similar to Apple TV. Hence the rename from Shield Console to Shield Android TV.

I think the change in marketing is because Nvidia weren't as successful in getting developers to make exclusive Shield console games. Or their executives woke up and noticed that there's no market for an Android game console.

Regards,
SB

 

[dobwal]

Why not throw in a TV tuner, DVR functionality and a robust photo and video editing app that's gpu accelerated. Half a Tflop of gpu performance and a 500 GB of storage is a bit much for Roku like TV box.

 

[Rangers]

Seems like some kind of shield NDA ended about an hour ago as a unboxing showed up on my youtube feed

Would be nice to see DF take a crack both at Grid and (more interestingly) the native games.

Definitely seems destined for the trash heap of Android consoles as a "tweener" in GPU power, but as I keep saying I cant wait till one of these hits 1TF+ for PS4/X1 ports, it could get interesting.

$300 for the 500 GB version spells problems, it's near Xbox One price anyway and suggests they wouldn't have a big price advantage on that theoretical future teraflop android box. OTOH the barebones $200 version couldn't compete with consoles as it could not download enough games.

Edit: Anandtech has a review too, so I assume lots of other sites do as well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9289/the-nvidia-shield-android-tv-review'

From Anandtech:

We also recorded power consumption at the wall while playing the above two games on a 4Kp60 display. In both cases the SHIELD consumed around 19.4 W on an average, considerably more than the power consumed in the media playback process.

Would make a nice Nintendo console.

 

[Rikimaru]

Seems like some kind of shield NDA ended about an hour ago as a unboxing showed up on my youtube feed

Would be nice to see DF take a crack both at Grid and (more interestingly) the native games.

Definitely seems destined for the trash heap of Android consoles as a "tweener" in GPU power, but as I keep saying I cant wait till one of these hits 1TF+ for PS4/X1 ports, it could get interesting.

$300 for the 500 GB version spells problems, it's near Xbox One price anyway and suggests they wouldn't have a big price advantage on that theoretical future teraflop android box. OTOH the barebones $200 version couldn't compete with consoles as it could not download enough games.

Edit: Anandtech has a review too, so I assume lots of other sites do as well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9289/the-nvidia-shield-android-tv-review'

From Anandtech:

Would make a nice Nintendo console.

flops is not a good measure for GPU. Unlikely 1TF shield will be near xbone level.

 

[Rangers]

Newest GPU's have much more advanced compression technology though mitigating some bandwidth issues.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It'll get really interesting when there's stacked RAM. And a microconsole like this could be running Windows 10.

 

[Rikimaru]

It'll get really interesting when there's stacked RAM. And a microconsole like this could be running Windows 10.

Win on ARM is useless.

 

[BRiT]

Win on ARM is useless.

Why?

 

[Rikimaru]

Why?

Lack of good apps.

It is better to install Linux then.