I was recently thinking about Intels potential role in future consoles and based on some interesting new information I felt that Intel was presenting one of the strongest cases for their participation in the next generation and that Nintendo is the leading candidate for using their technology in their console.
What Intel brings to the table:
Intel produces the best mobile CPUs out in the market today. Their performance per watt and performance within the laptop like power envelope expected for a next generation Nintendo console is second to none. They are the best potential supplier of a chip Nintendo could hope for as they are powerful, they sport excellent single thread performance and it is incredibly easy to extract that performance and the variability per chip produced is extremely low so almost every CPU in a wafer is a console candidate chip so their overall cost of production is very low.
Intel also working on a next generation graphics chip based upon their earlier work Larrabee which they shelved the first implementation due to the difficulties of the software implementation. This chip would be useful to Nintendo because it implements Ray Tracing relatively efficiently.
Why would Nintendo want this? For one it visually differentiates their console from the other two if they still use traditional raster methods of graphical rendering. Secondly it lowers production cost and simplifies the production of their games whilst producing higher quality images and thirdly Nintendo has always been more concerned about producing visually pleasing art work but they have never cared for reproducing realistic images in their games so they need not be concerned about whether their games stand up to a side by side technical teardown. Ray tracing may not give them the same visual complexity but it will make their games more visually pleasing which suits Nintendo of all companies pretty well.
Why would Intel want to work with Nintendo of all companies?
Nintendo is the largest console manufacturer in the world. The mere mention of the idea that Nintendo would be using the ray-tracing architecture from Intel would give it instant developer attention and credibility. Because of who Nintendo are, hundreds of development houses around the world will be forced or given a great incentive to consider Intels new graphics architecture. If they have to throw in cheap access to their new CPU architectures to do so its really quite a comparitively small price to pay.
Nintendo is also the only console manufacturer who would be happy to stay on Intel's old process nodes. Microsoft or Sony would be bugging Intel every other year to gain access to the newest process node to make the chips smaller. On the other hand Nintendos chips would already be as small as Nintendo would want to make them as they are very conservative in terms of their hardware implementation. They would be happy to start on 22nm and finish on 22nm 6 years down the track. They wouldn't be competing with Intels high margin cutting edge CPUs for production at their cutting edge fabrication plants. This means the cost per chip for Intel would be very marginal and they can make profitable use out of their old fabs to produce chips for Nintendo.
Tease.
