| Soundwave said: Yeah though I suspect this has changed for Nintendo, they simply can't use underpowered hardware anymore, not if they don't have a miracle gimmick to sell with it, and I think Nintendo has swallowed their pride on that account as the U tablet and the 3D screen failed to really drive hardware sales. Perhaps they have a deal with AMD/TSMC to cover against some of the early yield issues in exchange AMD/TSMC get the contract for Nintendo's portable line which needs to be compatible with the home line. I could see it. |
And what if TSMC's 10nm faces further delay ? What are Nintendo going to do about possibly missing the holiday window ? Is Nintendo willing to outbid Apple in terms of 10nm wafer allocation ?
You don't NEED to have the same chip designer for compatibility purposes. What you need are compatible tool sets for developers although this may hurt optimizations both way on specific platforms. Nintendo can make a cross-compatible x86/ARM compiler and design a more abstract graphics API like DirectX 12 or Vulkan and be done without having to worry about different hardware too much ...
