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Soundwave on 20 August 2016
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Pemalite said:
Soundwave said:

It's unlikely NX will have just a standard memory config, that's where Nintendo will likely insist on serious customization. 

Even the New 3DS has 10MB of eDRAM. Nintendo loves their high speed RAM pools. 

It will likely be paired up with LPDDR4 on a 32bit-64bit memory interface, why? Energy efficiency.

eDRAM isn't a magic bullet... And will also consume additional energy, drive up costs and require more traces and PCB layers.

Can't forget the Xbox One has a chunk of eSRAM as well, which will likely be operating at a higher frequency thanks to the higher thermal ceiling.

LPDDR4 is pretty decent as main RAM IMO. It is energy efficient and can get up to 50GB/sec these days which isn't bad considering. 

If Nvidia can give Nintendo a way to only need 10MB-16MB of eDRAM instead of 32MB, that wouldn't be bad. It will consume energy, but this is one area Nintendo is likely to splurge on because Nintendo simply loves their fast memory pools. 

If the 3DS has 10MB as is, it's unlikely the NX will have less. 

Unless Nvidia can provide a different solution or if Nintendo can maybe do something like a very, very, very small pool of HBM (only 10-32MB say), but I don't know if that would work. What consumes more electricity, eDRAM or HBM (out of curiousity)? 

I'll be interested to see how they handle this issue, this is probably the primary point that Nintendo has to customize the Tegra chip. Even a game like Zelda: BotW is likely highly dependant on having a very high speed pool of RAM, so the NX will have to have something in that regard I think.