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Soundwave on 26 January 2016
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Stefan51278 said:
Soundwave said:

 

PowerVR is looking to put an even more powerful 16-core version of this chip (7900) which is getting into XBox One territory full stop (800 GFLOPS) into cheap Android set-top boxes. 

I don't think these chips cost that much money and Apple is not the only vendor for them. Nvidia has a comparable chip too (the Tegra X1) which has been sold in a micro-console for a year already and that costs $199.99 with 3GB RAM and a fat profit margin. 

These chips are cheap. I think AMD could give Nintendo something similar if they wanted and AMD has very low margins (that's why they get all the console contracts). 

 

Maybe some cheap chip with 8 little cpu-cores and standard-arm-design, but Apple's A9X is none of that. That is a highly power-efficient-chip and not easy to get for Nintendo. It's not just pure random that an more expensive Intel-CPU with four Cores burns an AMD with eight Cores. Today it is more important for Chips what energy they use than which perfomance they have.

What also would be needed for X86 in the home console and ARM in the Handheld is a really good development-kit. Developers which didn't want to port games to the Wii U for having the PowerPC-CPU won't applaud for porting their code to two CPU-Architectures

I just really just used the Apple A9X as an example of PowerVR's tech, they have even better processors. 

 

A GT7900 is more powerful than a GeForce GT730M. The Apple A9X is basically a custom order 12 cluster 7XT chip so it's right into between the 7800 and 7900 above. 

PowerVR is targeting "low cost Android consoles" for the 7900 chip:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/imagination-powervr-gt7900-android-consoles,28638.html

Sony was smart to use PowerVR for the Vita, they basically have the same GPU as the top of the line iPad for that time ... thing is mobile tech has advanced considerably since then where you can literally probably have PC/PS4 ports now, not just some crappy Call of Duty spin-off the Vita got. Today you literally could port the actual recent COD game. 

PowerVR is one vendor, but Nvidia is doing similar things, so are the Qualcomm Snapdragon guys, I think AMD can give Nintendo similar types of processors too.