Soundwave said:
The Wii U chip gets about 11 GFLOPS/watt (if we believe the 350 GFLOP number that's used for it) at 40nm, if it was somehow possible to shrink that to 14nm, that would probably be in the range of 22-23 GFLOPS/watt which is fairly comparable to a Carizzo, no? Considering it's a 4-5 year old chip, that's not bad, I'm sure they could today improve it's power efficiency even more without just die shrinks too. As for pixels, I think for the portable maybe 960x540 resolution for really demanding 3D games, which would correspond 1:4 to 1920x1080 for the console. For lower end games, I think even the portable could just run things like Kirby's Rainbow Curse, Yoshi's Wooly World, Star Fox Zero, at 1280x720 though. 1 watt per 35GB of bandwidth sounds ok, but wouldn't that be too power hungry for a portable? The design of the handheld is going to have to be the trick here I think, because the console is relatively easy to figure out because you can just plug it into the wall. *If* they can get PS4 level engines (with some effects stripped down) to run on a portable at a reduced resolution, yes I agree, they would probably get a shit-ton of Japanese third party support at least, and probably an OK amount of Western support too. I wonder if that's doable though. |
Remember I just say Carrizo because it represents AMD's latest GCN core, along with using the Excavator line of CPU, all in the same SOC package, I think Beema and Mullins use different varients of Puma, one's Puma and the other Puma+, not sure about the level of GCN core in either of those.
AMD doesn't make IBM PowerPC CPU technology, it's all their own tech that they can provide Nintendo with, not IBM stuff, a single SOC makes way more sense than separate parts for a console, just because it's much cheaper and faster for manufacturing.
Whether AMD uses Puma, Puma+ or Excavator CPU technology it's all more capable than both Wii U's PowerPC and AMD's own Jaguar CPU tech.
The GPU in Wii U is an older architecture than the 7000 series tech in PS4 and XB1, the later stuff is more efficient on even the 28nm node it's built on.
AMD's current GCN core offers up 23.4GFlops per watt, so more than 2X more efficient than the GPU tech in Wii U, power consumption tests don't really state specifically how much energy the GPU alone uses, but the Carrizo System on Chip is packing a Quad Core Excavator CPU, at 2.1GHz, along with a 819GFlop GPU, as I said building a SOC with an 8 Core Excavator CPU and a 1638GFlop GPU would only require 70 watts for the SOC.
AMD's own tech is readily available, if Nintendo wrote an emulator they could emulate Wii U and 3DS.
As for the whole resolution on handheld thing, any higher resolution really isn't needed, it just adds cost and power demands to the system, for a handheld the more efficient it is the better. Going higher than 480p on a tiny handheld screen, when you can keep all of the gameplay features, most of the visual punch, enough of everything overall to make a good approximation of what the home console games look like is all you need to do.
This handheld spec I'm suggest can handle PS4 level visuals, with some slight concessions at 480p, things you won't even notice will be cut from the handheld version of games. That spec can definitely handle any games the Wii U had.
For reference 720p is 1280X720=921,600, as I said before 640X480=307,200, that's exactly 1/3rd of the pixels of 720p.
Our 819GFlop Carrizo APU runs on 35 watts, at 5 watts it's outputting 117GFlops (not counting the Excavator CPU performance or even talking about the better IPC gains over PowerPC), if Wii U has a 350GFlop GPU, then 1/3rd of it's performance is 116.6666666666667GFlops, the cutdown Carrizo is slightly more capable in the GPU department, plus the SOC would be HSA, allow way better multicore performance between the CPU and GPU.
Wii U level games would be no problem running everything the same, except for the resolution, 3DS games would be dominated by this system.
Re: Bandwidth HBM could be running slower, 35GB/s is at 1 watt, 25GB/s would only be 0.71watts, 1watt isn't too power hungry though, I mean the SOC would only be 5 watts, so memory and SOC would be 6 watts together. That's a 117GFlop GPU and probably 2 Excavator CPUs clocked at 1.2Ghz, in a handheld, very good performance IMO.
Bare in mind AMD Zen or the K12 CPU could be on the cards for Nintendo, that's a 14nm part, an even newer GCN part could be available too them and a newer HBM chipset, all with better performance.
Nintendo needs to think about what the development community outside of Nintendo wants, considering Nintendo are a member of the Khronos foundation I would think some version of Vulkan could very well be used in NX and perhaps they'll get help with their dev tools from AMD as a part of any collaboration on developing NX's processing tech.
The main area I think this will help Nintendo is in their own software sales, they'll push more 3DS and Wii U games if NX can run everything, which I don't see as unlikely, it would just require Nintendo to build an emulator for those games to run on NX. Personally I think there's no reason why Nintendo can't have both the handheld and console ready to go on the same day.
As I've shown AMD's tech is scalable, cutdown parts can definitely be made to fulfill the handheld's requirements, reducing power consumption, it all fits with what's required for a unified platform, hell even the whole API issue can easily be solved by Nintendo's involvement with Khronos and DeNA (from what I understand) can sort out the issues Nintendo have had with their online.
There's even positive rumors about 3rd party being happy with what they've been told about Nintendo's next platform. This all hinges on AMD providing everything in the processor department and them learning where they've gone wrong in the past.
The only area that I haven't heard a thing about is in Nintendo's own development camp. If Nintendo wants to gain back 3rd party then they need to make western focused games that will appeal to the western 3rd party market, of course any major shift in software focus would remain under wraps until NX gets officially announced, so this is something we probably won't find out about until E3 2016 happens, unless leaks begin to happen at some point this year or before E3 next year.
The hardware and API stuff seems like it could be covered, based on educated guesses and some logic, but it's still all just speculation for now.
