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Soundwave on 20 August 2015
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fatslob-:O said:
Soundwave said:

You can actually probably get that in a 5-6 watt power envelope. AMD is launching their 14nm chip line this year, that would be available for Nintendo next year. Something like 350 GFLOPS could be achievable for next fall without too much fuss. 

Of course there could be some interesting things done with a device whereby it downclocks a certain amount on the road, but if you're at home, and you have the option of plugging it into the wall adaptor, it could upclock. That could be a design possibility too. 

14nm transistors from Samsung/Global Foundries is not at all comparable to Intel's 14nm transistors just so you know ... 

AMD could probably easily achieve a 70 Gflops/watt ratio on their new GPU micro-architecture with newer transistor technology from Samsung but does that mean Nintendo will employ such a design in their consoles when 28nm chip designs are the most cost effective ? 

Throttling cannot be easily applied to games since they are performance critical applications so every bit counts therefore you cannot downclock as much as you would like when gaming. You have to guarantee worse case scenario power consumption ... 

Even if Nintendo does use the latest and greatest from AMD, Imagination Technologies, or even other IHVs the form factor matched with the power envelope is not that of a handheld with reasonable battery life ...

I think they're going to have to sit down and have a real, brutually honest discussion about that, particularily as it relates to third party support and what they want. 

I've always thought thought if you're making hardware decisions based on what makes sense for your launch year ... that's very short sighted. Is this is a product that's supposed to be viable in 2018? 2020? 2021? Or is it going to be "well we choose this hardware because it seemed nice in 2016, but I guess it was kind of not a smart move long term.". 

Then I think you need to plan accordingly. Costs scale with time, and I don't think part suppliers are so short sighted either, if you're making a huge volume order for something that's going to mean 5-6 years of orders for them, they likely will give you a break early on. 

If Apple can make/ship 10x more volume and they're already on 20nm and heavily rumored to be moving even lower than that this fall, I think it's time Nintendo kinda evoloved on this issue. You cannot be that old fashioned in this line of business. 

If your partner is saying they can give you 70 GFLOPS/watt .. use it for crying out loud. If using that tech means you can have games like Dragon Quest XI and maybe even Final Fantasy XV and RE Remake 2 and Metal Gear Solid V ... it's worth it. Such a machine would have monstrous support from Japanese devs and probably even Western devs too ... at say a 960x540 resolution a 400 GFLOP processor (6 watts) being able to play even modern engine games on the go (and through the NX concept, to be able to play them at home too) ... that really could be a game changer for Nintendo and developers.