A chip built at 7nm and a chip built at 14/16nm that is the exact same physical size? It will be cheaper to manufacture on 14/16nm.
Wafer costs go up every time you shrink.

I think you might have fallen for the advertising ploy that is "nm" naming these days.
Whilst 12nm does have inherent advantages over 14nm at say... Global Foundries... 12nm is just a refined 14nm process, which in turn is a refined 20nm process.

At-least Samsung and TSMC changed their BEOL.
You are looking at probbal 10-15% gains going from 14nm to 12nm at most... And I think I am being generous there.

DDR5 doesn't equate to LPDDR5.
Ram prices may also increase by 2021... You only need a couple of factories to be taken offline from a weather event.

I was more or less pointing at the memory speed on a 128bit bus in conjunction with a doubling of DRAM.

You can have the Ram run at the same clockrate/Mhz as the current Switch and you would still more than double your bandwidth, so it doesn't make sense to drive up the memory controller which consumes power when you have already made massive bandwidth gains.
Or, Nintendo might opt for higher clocked memory but a smaller bus which brings with it a ton of cost-benefits like a simper memory controller, less PCB traces and thus layers, simpler power delivery... You know. The usual.

@bolded: That's why I said about the same, not exactly the same. Sure, the 7nm will be more expensive, but not by much.

@italic: Nope, more like the original meanings, like 16nm and 12nm being the full nodes while 14nm and 10nm being half nodes. GF calling their upgraded 14nm a 12nm process was pretty awkward for me in that regard.

That said, I don't remember seeing any ARM chip being produced in any 12nm process, they all seemed to go straight to a 10nm process. I doubt anything else than Ryzen+ will be produced in that process either.

@underscored: I don't expect DDR5 in any Switch revision. Just wanted to point out with this that when CPU transition to another RAM standard, the old standard generally drops markedly in price. Hence why I followed it with saying that by then 8GiB DDR4 shouldn't be more expensive then compared to the 4GiB when the Switch launched.

@bolded and italic: I have a feeling that the bandwith is already a bottleneck on the Switch, hence why I wanted to widen it more than the increase in GPU processing power. Switch corrently is only using LPDDR4-1600, resulting in measly 25.6 GB/s bandwith. I agree that going all the way to LPDDR4-2666 while also doubling the channel with to 128 bit is probably overkill (LPDDR4-2133 would probably suffice), but 83 GB/s would certainly be a safer bet for no bandwith choking than just going 128bit and keeping the LPDDR4-1600

Nope. 7nm will be more expensive, it's actually been a trend for a long time now. It will take a couple years for TSMC/Samsungs 7nm to be price competitive.


Global Foundries is even stepping away from 7nm entirely... Meaning less capacity and competition at that node than say... 14/16nm.
https://www.anandtech.com/comments/13277/globalfoundries-stops-all-7nm-development

But in terms of fabrication... The bulk of IC's are 55nm and larger, with production of chips between 90nm and 180nm being 27% of the semiconductor market.

12nm is an extension of 14nm anyway... It was made that way to allow easy porting of 14/16nm chips.

The point I am trying to convey is that "nm" isn't actually representing an accurate geometrical size of shrinks.
I.E. Intels 10nm is actually in many aspects superior to TSMC's 7nm.

Ryzen is a large and profitable chip for AMD, so they can get away using a leading manufacturing processes.

All I am saying is that Ram is a commodity price so it will fluctuate wildly. 16GB of DDR4 for example today is more expensive than 32GB of DDR3 Ram I bought 8 years ago.

That is because the lack of bandwidth is a bottleneck on the Switch, the bandwidth it has is generally not doing it any favors at 1080P.

You are only looking at the raw bandwidth numbers.
The Switch actually has more available bandwidth than that.

In general... 50GB/s would probably be a good spot to be, it's roughly how much the Geforce 1030 has, which is a decent chip for 720P gaming. - Also find it not to be Bandwidth constrained either from when I did some overclocking testing.

2020 sounds like a reasonable time to me.

Given the Switch’s mobile nature, a mid-gen refresh would make sense. March 2020 would seem like the ideal time to release a mid-gen upgrade for the Switch. They could even sell a version of it that’s just the standalone tablet for Switch owners who just want to upgrade the hardware and don’t need another dock/joycons/grip/AC adapter. I imagine it could be powered by the Tegra X3, which should offer a decent boost and be available by then.

They could release an outright successor to the Switch, with a different form factor that is not necessarily compatible with the old joycons and dock, holiday 2022 or early 2023.

7nm is starting this year, until 2021 there's quite some time to get it cheaper. First years are always expensive, hence why the beginnings are called risk production.

Also, keep in mind the price is per wafer, and there are a lot of X1 fitting onto one 300mm wafer. So unless the yields are crap, the price increase wouldn't be sensible, again why I said about the same.

Just to explain you what I mean when I say about the same, let's say there are 300 chips on a 300mm wafer. Now if that wafer costs 1800$ the chips will cost 6$ each. If the wafer costs 3000$ then the chips cost 10$ each.

In percentage, the price increase would be over 50% and therefore massive. But in Real life terms 10$ isn't much more expensive than 6$

I sincerely hope the rumored system reconfiguration will fix all the issues NOT related directly to system power.

better battery sounds good. Maybe with VR-feature ? Is that possible?

ps. the wall street journal japan reports: New Switch Model will release In the second half Of 2019. My friend was right, in June (E3 or directly from Japan) there is the official announcement, by nintendo.