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. @Topic: The "News" ain't news for those who where even just casually watching the market in Japan. Wii U was sold out on Amazon Japan since early January, followed one month later by a huge drop in sales of Wii U consoles simply because it's heavely supply constrained. The situation is already getting much better since then, though it has not yet returned to normal. And damn, how could we get from that topic to the discussion above? |
I'm talking about the Shield console though the Tegra X1 is also in the Google Type-C tablet now too.
For starters I think 'handheld' is something the NX may redefine entirely. It may not be a 3DS/DS-like form factor at all, it may be more like a Wii U tablet in size (a portable console).
It may also explain a few things like why it seems like 3DS production/development is on-going ... I think 3DS will actually stick around longer than the Wii U will as it will fill the role of the cheap/pocket-friendly Nintendo handheld so NX does not have to check that box.
NX will be portable IMO but will be something different, a radically different form factor -- larger and able to accomodate a much different class of chipset and battery. Yes it would be bigger, but it would also be able to produce game experiences that can go on the road or in the home at a very high quality, there's nothing really quite like that on the market today, which is why I think such a direction would appeal to Nintendo.
That's just my guess, but I've said before I don't think NX is "3DS-2", Nintendo has said as much and I think they actually mean it.
Even assuming double the cost of an A9X ... $70 for the chip, $50 for a cost effective cheap 5-6 inch 720p LCD (entirely possibly 1280x720 resolution is dirt cheap, even $50 tablets have 720p screens these days), $30-$40 for RAM, $30-$40 more for misc electroncs, $20 for a huge battery ... eh ... I don't think $250 is very far off at all provided Nintendo is willing to sell roughly at cost or at a small profit at first.
Selling at cost makes all the difference in the world, the Vita used basically the same chip as the iPad 3 in 2011, it actually even came out *before* the iPad 3, and it cost $250 at launch, whereas the iPad went for a whopping $500-$800+. And really the Vita probably could've been closer to $200 even if Sony didn't get all exotic with insisting on a premium OLED panel instead of a cheaper regular LCD display (Sony has since switched to regular LCD to save costs).
