fatslob-:O said:
It's not like AMD will be using it to design chips for low margin products such as consoles so it still makes sense for Nintendo to use 28nm ... As for Nintendo getting the latest CPU and GPU micro-architectures from AMD that's only if their willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to port it to 28nm seeing as how AMD won't be wasting time on an old process node ... |
If the chip comes in 16nm already, there's no point in porting it back to 28nm, as this would make the chip much more expensive as it would use up almost 4 times as much space on a wafer - and thus having less chips per wafer. Since chips are sold per wafer, it would drastically increase their cost. Besides, the bigger chip would also consume more energy, possibly too much to work at the same clock speed as the 16nm chip.
If they would still be using a chip in 28nm from AMD, than it's probably a Puma (+) Processor (an evolution of the Jaguar in the PS4/Xbox ONE), since the Bulldozer based chips wouldn't work well (read: even worse) in a console, and a GCN 1.1/1.2 (PS4/Xbox ONE: 1.0) graphics chip. In both cases, the evolution upon the hardware in the other current-gen consoles is pretty weak, meaning Nintendo won't be able to come close to PS4 power unless they would more than double over the consumption of the Wii U. Since Nintendo has stated they prefer to build small, I doubt they will do so, as the extra power would need extra space for stronger cooling and heat dissipation.
So, either 14/16nm or along the line of Xbox ONE power at best. Unless they'd use 2 seperate chips for CPU and GPU, allowing them to mix 2 different production processes. But that's kinda pointless if the producer delivers both in a neat all-in-one package.
