What If The NX Console Is Portable Too?

[Soundwave]

JustBeingReal said:

Soundwave said:

JustBeingReal said:

You're doing it again, using Flop ratings to compare multiple different manufacturer's technology, when Floating Point calculations are not an industry standard measuring metric.

No company measures them in the same way, so you using them like they are is completely disingenuous.

No AMD are not aiming for 70GFlops per watt, going by the way AMD measures FLOPs, at 28nm's they've achieved 819Flops over 35watts, that's taking everything together into account across a Carrizo APU/SOC, which means they've achieved 23.4GFlops per watt, if that architecture can be shrunk to 14nm it would achieve 46.8GFlops per watt.

Perhaps they can optimize their design to gain more performance, but that would take time, 2016 probably isn't going to be when they can achieve 70GFlops per watt at 14nm, maybe they'll get close to 60GFlops, but this is based on how AMD measures floating point performance.

GFlops are not a standard for measuring total processor performance, you using PowerVR, Nvidia's Tegra or anyone else's tech as a comparison, with GFlops as a metric makes absolutely no sense, ratings are not comparable.

 

Flops are a marketing buzzterm, a fake figure to make it seem like you have X amount performance, but it's not accurate or a figure that is commonly always used in exactly the same way, nor does it cover total processor performance.

Flops don't tell you Instructions Per Second (IPS), cache size, cache amount, Bandwidth, latency between components inside a chip or between chips.

Let me ask you then, what's the maximum performance you think they can get in 4-5 watt power evelope for a handheld launching fall 2016?

 If it's not enough to at least be able to run Wii U ports ... I think Nintendo's whole conceptualization of this unified concept will probably have been a bad idea, but that's kind of becoming par for the course with their hardware designs of late. 

Well we know by AMD's own performance measuring metrics Carrizo, an APU/SOC that packs in 4 Excavator CPU Cores at 2.1GHz, an 8CU, 32TMUs, 8 ROP GPU clocked at 800MHz, that runs on 35 watts at 28nm and it produces 819GFlops.

We can compare that to PS4 and XB1, at least Wii U's GPU, Excavator is substantially more capable than the PowerPC cores in Wii U.

The above AMD tech would produce about half the performance of XBox 360 or about one third of Wii U's capabilities at 5 watts, maybe at 14nm Zen or a K12 APU could produce about 2/3rds of Wii U's capabilities on 5 watts, if Nintendo wants Wii U levels of GPU performance, with some more capable CPU and efficiencies aren't quite where they need them to be they can always use a larger battery, like a 10 watt unit as AMD do create SOCs that work on that level and that works for tablets, no reason Nintendo can't use the same for a portable version of the Wii U's Gamepad.

 

TBH though a handheld doesn't need to be as powerful as Wii U, the image the output isn't on a huge screen, it could even be 480p, so 640X480, which equals 307,200 pixels, exactly 1/3rd of Wii U's 720p or 921,600 pixel output, Nintendo can scale resolution down to run on a 117GFlop version of AMD's Carrizo tech, if they wanted they could even reduce graphical details and people probably wouldn't notice the difference because a smaller screen wouldn't show it.

I really wonder if AMD is the right company for this job if this is the direction Nintendo wants. Seems to me like PowerVR is able to get incredible performance in 10 watts or less and Nvidia is doing OK too, Tegra X1 seems like a beast. But I guess maybe Nintendo want to incorporate elements of the Wii U architecture/design and that's why they kept AMD? 

I dunno if Carrizo is power efficient enough, I know AMD has the Mullins architecture, that would probably be more suitable for a scalable platform that has to include a portable (or in Nintendo's case, the portable is very likely the lead/most popular SKU). 

Do you think it would be possible to use a small amount of HBM2 RAM in a portable? Not for the general RAM, but Nintendo likes to have very high speed caches of eDRAM (the Wii U has 32MB of it), could they have like 32 or 64MB of HBM2?