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Soundwave on 16 April 2016
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JEMC said:

I find it surprising that so many people know how the hardware is despite Nintendo not giving away dev kits, they must have some great crystal balls!

I don't believe half of this new batch of rumors.

Soundwave said:
$400 is a lot, Nintendo should press AMD to give it to them for $350 and push on their LCD providers too.

Nintendo can't really press AMD much, because they are their only option. IBM doesn't make GPUs and Nvidia is not only more expensive than AMD, but they have left a bad reputation in their past console contributions.

spemanig said:

...This sounds like science fiction. I'm going to learn what this is more because I clearly don't understand this thing enough.

The SCD could be a variation of AMD's XConnect, which allows laptops to use desktop graphic cards through an enclosure. The key point for that to work is to have a connexion with enough bandwidth to allow both devices to "talk" to each other without problems (like latency), and that kind of connexion is Thunderbolt 3/USB-Type C.

So if NX has a USB-Type C connector, then it may have a SCD, but if it doesn't, I won't count on it.

I dunno I would press AMD pretty hard, and the poster 10k on NeoGaf actually kinda speculated the same thing ... 

Nintendo may have put the heat to AMD to let them use the 14nm Polaris and AMD make even cover a certain overage on yields (since 14nm is a new process). 

BUT the trade off with that is Nintendo have given AMD the contract for the NX portable too and they may have offered it to AMD as an all or nothing deal, as in you cut us a break on the tech, and we'll give you two contracts here. 

Because if Nintendo wanted to go this whole unified platform route, I have zero doubt whatsoever that mobile vendors like PowerVR (supplier of Apple's iPhone/iPad processors and the PSVita GPU) and Qualcomm (makers of the Snapdragon chips for Android phones/tablets) would have been all over Nintendo particularily for the portable side. 

And since Nintendo would need a unified chip architecture to have cross compatibility of games, going with say PowerVR or Qualcomm would mean bye bye AMD. 

Even with a sluggish generation this cycle, the 3DS + Wii U will still sell about 85 million units ... which is still enough to get a lot of interest. So no I don't think AMD was their only choice. 

I suspect Nintendo learned some very bitter lessons on component costs with the Wii U and 3DS burning them badly at times, this time I suspect they were much more aggresive on component pricing.