In Theory: Nintendo's next-gen hardware - and the strategy behind it

[HoloDust]

JEMC said:

bdbdbd said:

jonathanalis said:
i dont think that will be an hybrid handheld/home console.
they will keep a home console and a handheld, but with same OS for easy porting.
arround 50% of the games will be shared, but each console will have their own exclusives.(the big hits will be exclusives: pokemon on handheld, 3d zelda on home console), all VC and indies will be shared.
powerwise, i wouldnt believe in something much more powerfull than ps4. 250 to 300$ at launch.(ps4 will last for at least more 10 years, developers will port for it even when ps5 is in, nintendo home console would benefit from it, if power was a issue for porting)
handheld somewhere between vita and wii U power, 150 to 200$.
date?2017

Just to point you out that Iwata talked about programming directly to hardware, meaning hardware compatibility and not OS,  and unified development, that specifically means no porting.

That's why Iwata mentions a unified architecture.

What Nintendo could do is, for example, launch a handheld with a low power AMD APU like Mullins with 2 or 4 low power AMD x86 cores and a 128 GCN GPU. And then, for its home console they could go again with AMD with 8 of those low power x86 cores and the equivalent of a 280X GPU part that's also based on the GCN architecture.

That way Nintendo could develop just one set of tools for both platforms, meaning that the devs would only have to learn them once, making the development of the games faster and with the option of launching them on both machines without the need of porting the games, just scaling down or up the assets.

I'm not sure that's enough, performance difference is pretty big.

I think if they're trying to go for 4-5TFLOPS console GPU (which would be pretty good since I think they'll stick to 1080p, upscalable to 4K, as opposed to MSony which will most likely go for anamorphic 2160p), IMO, they would need at least equivalent of iPad Air 2 or nVidia Shield Tablet if they want to make development for both systems scalable enough, even if they opt for 540p screen - which is not really out of reach considering that Shield is $300 with 8" 1200p resolution screen and that nVidia has just recently shown Tegra X1 with around twice the performance, so by mid 2016 K1 equivalent hardware shouldn't be very expensive.