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Soundwave on 13 May 2016
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se7en7thre3 said:
Soundwave said:

Polaris 11 honestly sounds pretty awesome for Nintendo.

2.5TFLOP is a beefy jump from the standard PS4 (more than the XB1-PS4 gap) and Polaris architecture is also better than what the PS4/XB1 had so there would be further improvements.

It should allow basically any PS4 port to run at 1080p at almost 1/3 the power consumption.

And a "portable mode" where the system maybe reduces to 1/2 the compute units for portable play would also be very interesting.

I could see Nintendo netting further power savings perhaps by using a custom memory layout, like say maybe 8GB LPDDR4 RAM + a small pool of high speed HBM RAM ... Nintendo loves their embedded RAM, even though HBM is expensive right now, a small amount of it might be workable. And it could act like eDRAM acts on the Wii U, or maybe they could just use eDRAM itself.

Seems like polaris + nintendo = gamecube situation.  Nice little box with good power.  2.5 TF is a pretty solid baseline for Nintendo.  Then you have the SCDs factoring in down the line so it all sounds good.  Then a mobile variant that is more tablet sized than typical HH, and we are in business.  Hope Nintendo doesn't screw this up...

Yup lets hope. Just feels like Nintendo will fuck this up some how though, lol. It just fits too good.

A SCD which is basically just a second Polaris 11 at 2.5 TFLOP (no CPU or extra RAM) would be awesome too ... 5 TFLOP of power for 4KTVs.

And this would scale ridiculously well, they could deactive several cores for portable play, but by 2018 or 2019 when 10nm is available they could probably make an even smaller handheld version (with the reduced "portable mode" CUs).

NX w/Polaris 11 = 2.5TFLOPS @ 14 compute units (full power, home mode)

NX Portable Mode = 900 GFLOPS @ 5 compute units (reduced power mode, games run at 1024x600 or 960x540 instead, lower detail settings but same gameplay). Capable of streaming to nearby TVs, tablets, phones.

NX w/SCD = 5 TFLOPS @ 28 compute units, optional for developers to support, can ramp up games to 2K-4K resolution, can also act a server sharing power over the NX network and giving the SCD owner rewards (like free games) for sharing power.

If you want to use the NX as a portable console, Nintendo can sell a seperate battery pack (10,000 MaH large battery) for about $30.

This would be a pretty great NX ecosystem setup.