Source: NX "Is Definitely Not Aiming To Compete With PS4 On Horsepower"

[Scoobes]

MajorMalfunction said:

Scoobes said:

An AMD x86 CPU would be far more power hungry than an ARM processor. That said, AMD are in a position (or will be in about 2 years time when they round up development on their ARM chips) where they can actually supply an ARM and an x86 SOC to Nintendo (with the same GPU architecture on both chips).

This would fit quite favourably with the NX concept. And whilst x86 CPUs can emulate ARM processors, I'm not sure Nintendo would favor this as it's fairly inefficient. I think they'll probably look to make dev tools that can translate the same set of code for both architectures. I think Sony do something similar with PS4 and Vita.

Another option is to put an ARM CPU and an x86 CPU on the same SoC, and have an ARM/GPU SoC for the handheld and an ARM/x86/GPU SoC for the home console. It's a little crazy, but hear me out: ARM had great support for co-processors. Something as ubiquitous as a CPU's MMU is a co-processor on ARM, at least pre-ARMv8. After ARMv8, the MMU was integrated with the CPU and coprocessor support was phased out, so Nintendo would have to add it back in. Other components like USB controllers, etc. would be separate chips from the SoC. In both cases, the OS would run on the ARM CPU. I've looked at die shots for all the 8th gen consoles, and all 3 use ARM CPUs as part of their security during boot time, so it's not totally far-fetched. I'm not convinced that this isn't a terrible idea, but it seems, at the very least, plausible.

I was thinking the same thing, and the only company I know of that could pull that off (due to licensing) is AMD. What's held me back from suggesting that particular x86/ARM hybrid SOC is that AMD currently don't have anything like that in their pipeline. I don't know if that's for technical reasons or if they could do it for a custom SOC but there's no market in consumer tech.

Either way, if they could pull that off, it could be an easy way to meld hand-held and console.