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

[JEMC]

HoloDust said:

JEMC said:

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.

Oh, don't take the numbers as what I think will happen. 128 GCN fro GPU and 4 CPU cores is what the current Mullins APU has, which is why I used it as an example.

If Nintendo is smart and uses AMD, which is the most likely scenario, they'll go with their next gen of APUs that hopefully will use their Pirate Islands GPU architecture (more efficient, something that Nintendo likes) and hopefully also a Zen based CPU part.

Alternatively, they could go with an ARM processor for both machines, but given that devs are struggling with the Jaguar processors of the PS4/X1, I don't want to imagine how pissed they'd be with Nintendo.