Soundwave said:
Polaris 11 is still way too hot for a portable passively cooled form factor even if you sliced the performance down to 1/4 ... it would still run at like 12 watts for the GPU alone, which means a portable would have to run at 14-15 watts factoring in the screen, WiFi, and CPU also. The battery would have to be the size of a lap top battery (Macbook Retina 15 inch sized I'm talking) to run that for even 3 hours. More likely Nintendo is using mobile chips here, that means Nvidia or PowerVR or Qualcomm (Snapdragon). AMD just doesn't have the experience with mobile chips. |
I think if Nintendo's goal is to have their games work across various hw, they will get it done. For starters, using the same cpu architecture like ARM will greatly help.
I mentioned "portable" but I suspect that if the first iteration of NX is the home console, the next would be a mini tablet (7 in) sold w/pro controller or attachable control dock. I think the old school, tiger electronics HH format could very well be ditched or possibly a later NX product. We saw with Wii U nintendo making a faux tablet ,so they are in tune with what is popular, but they will modernize this time (multitouch screen etc). I believe with miitomo and future apps, nintendo will want to go with familiar HW design and that means tablet and phone format.
As for power consumption, I could see that polaris 11 cut down and downclocked a bit, taking into the 40s watt range and still outperforming ps4. And tegra could very well power the tablet's gpu, but again, as long as both are using arm cpus it will make their work a lot easier.
