Will the next generation Nintendo console be backwards compatible with the WII U ?

[Pemalite]

fatslob-:O said:

Pemalite said:

fatslob-:O said:

Pemalite said:
I personally think they will shift over to ARM, they're cheap, lower power and AMD is now an ARM licensee and is now producing/Designing ARM chips, so they can make a very powerful console-orientated ARM SoC.
It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that it could end up with 8-16 ARM cores combined with a Radeon GPU.

And considering that the successor won't arrive for many years... ARM cores should be faster than Jaguar, easily.

With that in mind, it does mean Backwards compatibility would be broken at a hardware level.

Hmm ... I expect that nintendo's next generation SoC will likely feature a manufacturing process node of 14XM nm from global foundries or it could be TSMC's 16nm because I expect them to release a new console by 2016

Potentially speaking it could be possible for the new nintendo SoC to have 16 cortex A57 ARM cores so being more powerful than the lowly jaguars wouldn't be out of question. 

If they do pull off this move it could mean huge savings for development costs.

It's really not hard to make something faster than Jaguar. xD Even at 40nm... Or heck 65nm even.

You'd most likely have to resort to using a bigger die space though but I highly doubt that the jaguar is THAT bad considering it can pull off around 100 Gflops. Even if you had a 16 cortex A57 clocked at around 2 Ghz you would still only get around 100 Gflops because NEON is only a 128 bit wide SIMD engine whereas the jaguars support the AVX extension which allows up to a 256 bit wide vector operations.

You also forget to account for scaling issues also. 8 cores is already problematic enough as it is but 16 cores is hell. 

Well considering the Cortex A9 is only 26 million transisters per core... (I'm unable to find counts for it's other CPU's) that's some pretty impressive gflop's per transistor.

AMD did however state that it's AMD Opteron A1100 (ARM Cortex A57) was faster than the AMD Opteron X2150 (Jaguar) server chips at the same TDP, I would be interested to see transister counts thats for sure! And whether they used AVX.
With the APU's in the consoles hitting 5 Billion... They could have had a more powerfull CPU in not only single threaded but massively in multi-threaded.

I do agree that scaling to 16 cores is problematic, but developers could have used say... 6 cores for the game itself, then used another 6 for say, framebuffer effects (Think: Morphological Anti-Aliasing.) and Audio, the rest for the OS and other tasks, there is always a use for extra cores if the developers think a little outside of the box.
Heck, think of the Physics! :P