bonzobanana said:
I'm just thinking of frame buffer memory within the main SOC. Pretty much same arrangement as wii u except the frame buffer memory type may not be the same and won't be on a multi-chip module so size may be more limited. This will give the Switch some very fast bandwidth memory. If they've removed the 'little arms' they have some space left and they can expand the cache memory or a specific cache in size. From what I read previously there is also a power saving to doing so. So its a double win however this costs in R&D, however the fact they didn't want to move from maxwell architecture makes me think they had done at least significant customisation. Maybe 4, 8, 16 or even 32MB in size. Similar to the PS4 and Xbox one where Sony went with expensive external memory GDDR5 but Microsoft ripped out some of the gpu performance of the SOC so they could fit some fast frame buffer memory and then used cheaper much slower external memory. Also there could be a high performance decompressing chip in there to assist with cartridge load times and extra security functionality plus minor functions to assist in VR and perhaps sensors. The customisation of the wii u gpu and cpu had; original wii gpu 2MB of frame buffer memory (wii) which also served as gamepad frame buffer memory 1MB texture memory (wii) which again served as gamepad texture memory. Additional arm chip for DSP audio and no doubt many other customisations too but we can see that customisation is mainly about backwards compatibility so really with Switch its all about bonus performance they can get out of it without cost. Another factor is the Tegra X1 has power saving functionality with throttled performance when hot. All that is removed from the Switch. Its portable performance is set at one state so games perform consistantly which is probably why cpu has dropped so much and gpu performance a little. They have gone for a low thermal level which can be maintained with a small stepped or variable speed internal fan. Probably if you want to see what they may have done their last similar design was the new 3DS so there may be some pointers there. It's even possible it has a small arm chip to run the background operating system releasing all the power of the 4 Arm A57's for games this would give it a significant cpu performance boost over xbox 360 at least which I believe had to give one thread to audio processing, one thread to the operating system and some cpu performance to assist the more primitive gpu. |
I agree, we can rely just guess what customization Nintendo made for now, but my guess is also something memory and CPU related. Also it not giving that Switch has only 4 ARM A57 cores...like I wrote, hopefully we will have more infos in January.
