JEMC said:
Pemalite said:
Zen won't be expensive/expansive.
You don't put a full-featured Desktop CPU into a console, you just don't, console's do not have the cooling capacity nor power delivery, heck they can't even afford to do it.
A low-end Quad-Core Zen would be more than adequate, maybe even a high-clocked Dual-Core. (A Dual-Core Intel chip can be faster than all 8-cores in the Xbox One/Playstation 4.)
Zen will fill AMD's entire product stack from cheap tablets right up to 16-core servers, it will also be the Architecture which will replace Carizzo and the other APU's.
HBM? Why? HBM is useless in a console, you are only gaming at a last-century 1080P. Nor would a console employ such an expensive memory system, you aren't paying $1000 for your hardware.
Let's say the NX had 150Gb/s of GDDR5X (Or plain ole' GDDR5) bandwidth... It will make better use of that than the PS4 which has 176Gb/s of bandwidth.
Why? Compression. Or more specifically Colour compression. - It's amazing how newer GPU's tend to have newer technologies to drive up efficiency, so the NX doesn't need more raw bandwidth (And thus more expensive memory chips) to beat the PS4.
Polaris will likely be a good deal faster than only 2x than the PS4, in the high-end at-least.
Fury X is already 3-4x faster... At 1080P. - But it doesn't really show it's true muscle untill you start gaming at 1440P or 4k, then it is in a league of it's own.
Polaris at the mid range could actually meet where R9 290/390 is right now in all regards except bandwidth, with superior energy characteristics, 14nm is showing some great promises that AMD and nVidia have been vocal about.
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That's great and all that, but there is a big problem: we're talking about Nintendo.
I remember when we were having the same discussion about Wii U, with many of us making the same mistake of believing Nintendo would use modern hardware. And look how Wii U ended.
Taking for granted that Nintendo will use Zen and Polaris is a mistake and goes against all what Nintendo has done in the past, always going for tried and tested hardware for their products. In fact, if this rumor is true (something that I don't believe) then NX looks to be an hybrid device, and for that, an ARM processor seems more likely.
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big difference is Nintendo went into the Wii U from having succeeded with the Wii with gimmicks and mediocre power/hardware. Obviously from that perspective they figured continuing gimmicks (of sorts) would work, the Wii U with the tablet controller
I would find it very hard to believe that Nintendo, in the midst of failing with the Wii U, said "oh hey, lets try another gimmick woooh". they're not stupid. Nintendo is a business and in some ways is more about focusing on profit than any other companies in the video game industry. There's no way they aren't focusing on either going for power for their next system, or possibly the concept of unifying their platforms
one way or another I think it will be one of those two options because both are sound concepts to bring back the casual fans and to either help get the third parties more interested (more powerful system) OR to give Nintendo less work to do (Unified platform)
