| Bofferbrauer said: NVidia Shield uses the Tegra 4, not the X1, which only has around 1/4th of the GPU power of an X1: https://shield.nvidia.com/store/portable Also, we don't know if there is a large profit margin (or any profit at all; really - it may as well be sold at loss and recover the costs trough software sales on it). Besides, since NVidia is making their own chips they don't have to buy them from third parties, reducing it's cost naturally. The 35$ cost of the A9X also is just the pure production cost, without any development, shipping and is calculated from a theoretical 100% yield rate, which never occours. You can easely more than double that price if you include all the other costs, too. High processing power on a mobile device always comes at a cost of battery life. The NVidida Shield does have good battery life and power, but that's due to it's weight of almost 600 gramm, 3x what a traditional handheld console weights (even the 3DS XL models only weight around half as much) to accomodate the necessary batteries. It is thus necessary to strike some balance here, high-end mobile chips just draw too much power. The 8-10Watts of consumption for Tegra K1 and X1 are too high for handhelds unless making something of the size of the 3DS XL the new base model and an even bigger model the mainline version to accomodate for the necessary batteries to keep the handheld running, which would make them rather clunky and heavy. 250$ is a price at which a competent handheld can be produced, but in no way will it be more powerful than a Wii U. Just for camparision, the Snapdragon 820, currently the highest model in the whole line, comes with a Adreno 530 as it's graphics chip. As explained, this chip would already be too powerhungry for a handheld console and certainly also too expensive to meet the projected 250$ pricetag. But while the ARM CPU part of the Snapdragon 820 possibly beats the CPU of the Wii U (only possibly because it's only a dualcore marketed as a quadcore due to ARMs big.LITTLE concept with 2 high-power cores and 2 low consumption cores alternating depending on the running tasks), the Adreno 530 is less powerful than the graphics chip on the Wii U. Sure, it says 588GFlops against the 320GFlops of the Wii U, but those of the Adreno are only in half precision, meaning you need to cut the number at least to half, making less than 300GFlops. Thus, while an ARM based Handheld device could be a sucessor of the 3DS, it would actually be weaker than a Wii U and thus unsuitable to replace that one, too. And while it is very much possible to create more powerful hardware around ARM CPUs, it would make the chips much more expensive and again, more consuming, too much for handheld devices. And damn, how could we get from that topic to the discussion above? |
You are right. But remember that the Shield Android TV launched in May,28th last year. And we're gonna be a year and a half later by the time NX launches (at the minimun). I think 1.5 years is enough time for Nvidia (or any other competing company) to have a chip with similar performance and lower cost than the Tegra X1 (and remember that there was even a model for $199)
