Is there any point in making a "from the ground up" GPU in this day and age anyway? Aside from wanting ridiculous power consumption restraints, it just seems to me like a massive waste of time and money, and Nintendo is probably paying out the rear end for this GPU because it's so heavily customized.
Why not just use a more off-the-shelf part that AMD has already done most of the grunt work on, tweak it specifically for games and cut power consumption here and there and call it a day?
Many of AMD's notebook GPUs would've given Nintendo close to XBox One performance and still a reasonable power draw (40 watts or so) and probably would've even been cheaper per unit than going for a completely custom part.
And third parties would've liked it more too because PC GPU architecture to them is like putting a fish in water.
I think this is going to be one of the bitter lessons Nintendo learns from this generation. No one cares about the difference in power consumption in a console unless you are making something the size of a house and a custom solution in the long term just isn't worth the time or money or headaches from disgruntled third parties.
