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Soundwave on 20 July 2015
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Bofferbrauer said:
Soundwave said:
I kinda hope Nintendo just ditches AMD to be honest.

PowerVR can give them better performance per watt at likely a lower price.

The GT7900 could give them 800 GFLOPS on the console variant at under 10 watts and can scale up even further if they want. A mobile version of the same chip could be in the 400 GFLOP range for 5-6 watts and give them a very powerful handheld.

I doubt AMD can beat those performance ratios, if they could they would be making GPUs for tablets/phones and be a big player in that scene, but they're not.

Make smart decisions with the hardware, IBM/AMD sure as heck aren't helping Nintendo now, they're stuck with a bloated custom design that they can't lower the price on. Use a more mainstream vendor like PowerVR IMO. They make the Apple iPhone/iPad GPUs so you know they operate on a huge mass production scale.

I doubt the GT 7900 does consume less than 10W TDP, even less so at your 800 GFlops (it's stated to reach 666 GFlops @ 650Mhz, clocking it at around 800 Mhz WILL drastically increase consumtion - if these speeds can even reached with it's architecture). Apple's A8X uses the biggest PowerVR Chip to date, which only makes around 330 GFlops, half of an GT 7900, yet still get pretty hot.

Also, PowerVR are notoriously bad at their drivers, just ask Intel about the tons of gliches and incompatibilities they provoked when they used them in their early iGPs. And while they had comparable GFlop capacities to early mid-level AMD APU, they still got trounced by them as they couldn't get their theoretic power to the ground.

Also, considering a custom chip where all unessessary parts and functions are cut out a bloated design is actually pretty funny, but the contrary of reality. If it has a good yield rate (which it should by now), I don't expect Nintendo having to pay much more than 20-30$ for the whole package, a price the GT 7900 would easely surpass on it's own. Why? Because it's not their own design, so Nintendo would only be a normal client and charged as such.

And again, you're forgetting a CPU.


If AMD is so great, why does no one in mobile use them? I doubt AMD can give Nintendo the same power per watt for the same price PowerVR can. There's a reason Apple banks on them. A8x does get warm, but it works and works fine and is in tens of millions of devices, mass produced at 20nm without too many hitches since last year. 

IMO, one of the reasons Nintendo is having problems is they haven't been smart in the last few years in their component partner choices. Yamauchi was much more focused on getting a the best price for performance, whereas Nintendo since then has become bogged down into "well our designers only want this architecture" or something. Poor decision making. 

I'd suspect NX will probably be something like 300 GFLOPS for the handheld version and 600 GFLOPS (basically just double) for the home version at 28nm and Nintendo will likely even pay more to get that performance than Apple does.