fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:
By 2023 it should be well and truly possible to achieve base PS4 performance when portable, and a boost to around Xbox One X level when docked.
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No, there's a bigger gap between base PS4/X1X (3x) than Switch in portable vs docked mode (2x) ...
Besides the Switch has already consumed one more transistor shrink compared to base PS4 (28nm vs 20/16nm) so if Nintendo released a new system in 2023 that only gives them 2 more transistor shrinks to work with so Nintendo's new portable system could easily end up with lower performance than even base X1 if we still assume that perf/watt will linearly scale by 2x with each transistor shrink ...
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There will be possibly three shrinks - but two of them are half-shrinks, so the math still ends up being right, apparently.
We know from a TSMC panel on a ITRS meeting, if I'm not mistaken, and their aim for pitch sizes, that both their 7 nm and 5 nm are going to be half shrinks, though 10 nm was a full shrink indeed from 20 / 16 nm.
That's assuming, of course, Nintendo will release a new console with a brand-new node, and even then, that it will use all the battery juice for raw power instead of extending its life from the Switch's mere three hours.
Even if it waited until 2027 it's not a guarantee the next TSMC node, indeed a full shrink - 3.5 nm, the last one planned before die stacking - would be widely available, given how long the wait for some recent nodes.
So some people are indeed overestimating the power of the theoretical Switch's sucessor given its undocked mode often loses even to the X360 (the main exception being possibly when the X360 was RAM starved) and that's a 12 year old hardware, from a time die shrinks were much easier as well.