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Soundwave on 16 April 2016
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JEMC said:
Soundwave said:

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. 

Of couse they pressed AMD to try to get a better deal, but they can't really press too much because both Nintendo and AMD know that Nintendo has no other viable option except them. ARM is not good enough for a home console. 

Also, I would put that 14nm Polaris rumor on hold because it's too surprising and contradicts his other info:

+The NX will use a custom Polaris-like GPU. Likely will be on a FinFET 14nm fabrication node. The source told me it's on the same architecture with heavy customizations of course . It will contain the feature set of Polaris. It is "marginally better than the PS4" and theoretically could be "2x the power of PS4 GPU". I asked about PS4K being rumored to have a gpu 2x as powerful as the OG PS4 and how the theoretical performance of the NX would be and was told "Theoretically it could be close to the PS4K rumored specs". Of course, we know nothing of Polaris or the PS4K specs, but he gave that metric.

+Most dev kits won't be given until Nintendo formally reveals the NX. As my previous post indicated, Nintendo is none too happy with the leaks and is keeping things on lockdown. Outside of close partners and internal teams, most devs are using SDK's until the NX reveal. Not a big deal, but I was told specs are pretty much final as of now, and the May update will likely be for the final spec sheet and not target specs.

Leaving the discrepancy between the GPU being "marginally better" to be "2x the power of PS4 GPU" (and in the same sentence!) aside, how does so many people know that NX will use not only a Polaris chip, but also a 14nm chip if so little people have actual dev kits? Software Development Kits don't show that kind of info.

I think it's Polaris for the other reasoning that I just can't see Nintendo releasing a 100 watt+ console, and that's what you'd be looking at with a 28nm AMD GPU above a PS4. They're too obsessed with low power consumption, the moment they saw Arctic Islands/Polaris they probably fell head over heels. 

I actually think PowerVR would have been a good vendor for Nintendo. They are actively looking for a console maker too and the performance per watt they're getting out of their Apple GPUs is pretty astounding. The GT7900 is 800 GFLOPS and can scale even beyond that based on vendor needs, they're hoping to get that chip into micro-consoles. 

AMD probably bent over backwards and said OK when presented with the golden apple of being able to supply for the Nintendo portable. 

AMD has been basically locked out of mobile, if they can supply the portable NX with chips, that at least gets their foot in that door and would be a nice feature in their cap above Nvidia that's still struggling to get vendors for their Tegra X1.