Pemalite said:
JustBeingReal said:
I hadn't seen this, but this article was published 10th of Jan 2015:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-in-theory-nintendos-next-gen-hardware-and-the-strategy-behind-it
"Around 18 months ago, during an informal chat with an extremely well-placed individual in the hardware manufacturing business, an interesting nugget of information dropped into the conversation - Nintendo was already accepting pitches from third parties on the hardware make-up of its successor for Wii U. Two names were mentioned: AMD and Imagination Technologies, creators of the PowerVR mobile graphics tech. With the lack of backing sources, that little aside never made it to print, but as Nintendo strives to bounce back from the Wii U sales disappointment, eyes inevitably turn towards future platforms."
So no mention of IBM or NVidia.
For the record if Nintendo went with AMD they could still have an ARM CPU, depends on when K12 is going to be ready, but given that 3rd party asked Sony and Microsoft to go with X86 and Nintendo were making decisions based on 3rd party input it seems highly likely that X86 would be the CPU of choice for a new console.
I hope Nintendo doesn't wait too long after E3 to announce NX and announce exactly what NX is and what tech it's using. |
AMD doesn't need K12 to throw out an ARM chip.
They are a full ARM Licensee, they have a license to use all of ARM's IP and freely customize it... If a company apparoches AMD and says "We want this ARM CPU" AMD can take ARM's IP and go straight to the fab and start producing chips almost straight away. (Provided there are no modifications outside of ARM's design.)
A company can also approach AMD and say they want "This and this" in their ARM chip and AMD can add/customize it to any extent they want.
If Nintendo was going to use an ARM chip though, it is likely they will not go for a heavily customized CPU core, in order to reduce time-to-market and R&D costs.
AMD already has a few ARM CPU's on the market such as the Opteron A1100, which used 8x Cortex A57 cores, DDR3 and DDR4 memory controllers, PCI-E 3.0, Sata 3, built on 28nm etc'. - Which is ready for prime time.
We also cannot forget AMD Skybridge which has an ARM+x86 CPU+Graphics Core Next GPU all on the same chip, unfortunately it got cancelled, but the R&D for that was mostly done, which is also the R&D that was leading into K12, Nintendo could be the design win for this.
Basically the rumors of x86 or ARM or Both are all as equally as feasible as each other.
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My point wasn't that AMD didn't have an Arm option now, that efficiency just isn't there with current AMD options available in the arm space, K12 would bring that to the table.
Current Opteron chips aren't very efficient, they're 32nm, whereas K12 would be 14nm, so substantial improvements would be made to efficiency and overall performance. Excavator based APUs are more efficient at 28nm, but X86 is the desired platform for 3rd party developers and compared to what's in PS4 and XB1 even Puma was 50% more efficient than Jaguar.
8 Puma cores could hit 2.4GHz and only use 30 watts, Jaguar required 30 watts for 8 cores at 1.6Ghz, an Excavator based APU, with 4 CPU cores clocked at 3.4Ghz, along with 8 GCN Compute Units clocked at 800Mhz only used 35 watts.
X86 is way more likely given that Nintendo were open to 3rd party input at the inception of planning for NX, when you take into consideration the efficiency differences available from the X86 chips compared to what's currently available with Arm options it makes it a no brainer for Nintendo to go with an AMD X86 over an Arm chip. 3rd party have been building their big titles on X86, the major engines use X86 as the basis for their technology.
