Who will provide the NX GPU?

[Pemalite]

Soundwave said:

Pemalite said:

Right on. We don't know the financial details.
nVidia was likely wanting a design win for Tegra as it's been a pretty big flop all things considered.

And if you have a successfull design win, then chances are other manufacturers get onboard.

With that said, don't believe everything you read at Semi-Accurate.

Tegra doesn't have the best CPU performance, that's important for gaming as well you know.

Adreno 530 is also able to give Tegra X1 a good run for it's money, the main reason why Tegra seems to smash the competition in devices like the Shield TV is basically attributed to higher thermal ceiling which allows for higher clocks... If the device is a "Hybrid" then you need to account for the mobile form factors lower thermal ceiling.

And we can't forget about the Mali G71/Bifrost either, which is set to be able to rival Tegra in terms of single precision compute.

Isn't that kinda dependant on the CPU cores that the SOC uses? The rumor is the ARM CPU that Nintendo could use would be the ARM A72, which would be quite powerful. 

LCGeek from NeoGaf has said actually the NX CPU is better than the PS4 CPU. We'll see if that's true or not. 

Adreno can give X1 a run for its money, but it looks like Nvidia is the one that got the nod. For a *hybrid* device it's unlikely there are many options better than what Nvidia will be able to do with a Pascal based Tegra, and unlike Adreno or PowerVR or whoever .... Nvidia doesn't have any phone or tablet partner win ... which means Nintendo likely is getting their chip from Nvidia for cheaper than what a company like Adreno would give it for. Nvidia's Tegra line needs this a hell of a lot more than Adreno or PowerVR do. 

If Nintendo uses Tegra. Then it will not be A72.
At best it would be a couple of Denver 2 cores paired up with quad A57... In a BIG.little configuration.
At worst it will be 4x A57 cores paired up with 4x A53 cores also in a BIG.little configuration.

They don't hold a candle to 8x Jaguar cores that can all be used at once, if you had only 4x Jaguar cores this would be a very different discussion.
To put things into perspective, Atom typicaly gives ARM a run for it's money with only 2-4 cores.

It will be intersting if nVidia licensed transmeta's code morphing technology for Denver 2, it was supposed to be in the original Denver but never made it.
It would have allowed nVidia to pull off something similar to what Intel did with Binary translation... To be able to run x86 and ARM code.
It's also how Transmeta achieved full x86 compatability with the Crusoe and Efficeon chips.

Thus if the Nintendo's dock truly does exist and it is a complimentary power-adding "module" that would in theory allow a degree of compatability regardless of the underlying CPU architecture or in theory, OS.