Leaker (Rumor): NX Is Modular, Upgradable, Uses Tegra X1 Successor

[Pemalite]

fordy said:
I still find it hard to believe that Nintendo have left AMD who basically own the remnant companies Nintendo has dealt with the entire time it's gone into 3D consoles (ArtX for N64, ATi for Gamecube/Wii, AMD for WiiU). On the other hand, I can't think of a portable SoC processor from AMD, letalone one as capable as the Tegra.

If the rumors are indeed true, I'd love to see a dual chip setup; one on the portable and one on the dock. The bus extension can be established with something similar to Intel Thunderbolt and incorporate SLI. In portable mode, the system would only need to drive a small screen, whereas two Tegras in some kind of SLI setup can be more than capable of driving a 1080p display or higher.

AMD could actually petition Qualcom for Adreno. - Remember, Adreno is derived from AMD's tech, and if you reassmble the word "Adreno" it spells out "Radeon"... It's not like AMD doesn't have experience in Ultra-low powered cores.

AMD has 28nm APU's today, quad-core Puma+ and 128 GCN shaders running at 2.8 - 4.5w of power, perfect for a tablet sized handheld... Keep in mind Polaris/14nm tech is roughly 2.5x more efficient than the older 28nm designs.
So having a 320-512 shader design wouldn't be far-fetched, it would certainly give Tegra a run for it's money.

As for Thunderbolt. Yuck. Why would you bother when Tegra has PCI-E lanes at it's disposal?
1080P rendering on Tegra isn't going to happen. Even with two chips working in Tandem with a degree of graphics quality we have come to expect this gen... There are multiple reasons for this, but I don't see the need to get into it again.