| Soundwave said: I'm looking at Nintendo's 3DS really sad 77k 3DS sales for this past month in the US ... man that's just not good, not with the New 3DS still being somewhat recently released. Maybe it is time for a more drastic design change? Maybe they should just go balls to the wall with the hybrid concept. It would be unique and different from anything else on the market at least. Slap a massive 43 wH battery into a design that's like a oversized DS/3DS meets a mini-laptop I guess. This is the battery that was in the 4th gen iPad, it's not terribly expensive, but it is big, so it ain't fitting into a 3DS XL size casing. But now you can go with a 9-10 watt processor, lets say AMD/Nintendo can bump up a little to about 55 GFLOPS/watt (slightly better than the Carrizo). 550 GFLOPS on battery power, maybe say even 800 GFLOPS when plugged into the wall (home play). Optional HDMI wireless receiver for the TV sold seperately, it can stream right to the television wirelessly. Let iPhone games cover the need for low-market gamers, keep the N3DS around in stores for a few more years too. Even $299.99 I think is reasonable for a product that can function as both a portable and home console. |
That's more than double the performance per watt of Carrizo, 819Gflops divided by 35 watts equals 23.4Gflops per watt.
The SOC alone would require 10 watts to produce 234Gflops of compute performance, you need to add the power required for memory to that too, along with the power needed for the screen, if it has rumble capacity, in-built memory storage or a card reader for memory storage, along with the disc/card reader to play the game or APPs.
The whole unified API and architecture, with transitional improvements to new models of hardware added to the NX family still makes the most sense, as it allows Nintendo to be flexible with their hardware choices for various different markets and put their software at the forefront, removing the barrier of development of games.
I think a Nintendo that provides mulitple options for how you can play their games is the best thing for everyone going forward. The platform should be Nintendo, not a specific piece of hardware, Nintendo may end up selling more hardware that way too, because that would give gamers more options for when and how they can play their games.
The least amount of hardware that Nintendo can get away with in the handheld, the lower the cost it will have. A small screen simply isn't going to show up the finer visual details and a handheld with the level of tech I mentioned before can basically do everything needed, just cut the resolution, and AA or reduce textures and geometry and the rest will fit.
The home console should be the more beastly machine, because it can justify it's higher costs, with the finer details being detectable on a larger screen and a higher level of fidelity to add that as a selling point..
