Nintendo NX may have originally been using AMD chips in early 2013-14 prototyping

[JEMC]

Soundwave said:

JEMC said:

I said that the handheld could have been powerful enough, not that it would be more powerful than the Tegra based NX.

And the notion that the home console could have been as powerful as the PS4Pro comes from the GPU mentioned both in the OP and the linked article in it: a 4.6 TFlops GPU based on the Hawaii powered R9 290X.

Can't really see Nintendo ever making a console that size of an XBox One (original), like even the PS4 Pro is pretty huge. 

What they could do is take like 3 Tegra X2 processors and put them into one box (or make a custom version of the chip that's effectively 3X more powerful; scale it up to 768 CUDA cores) for easy/cheap NX "home console".

That likely would give you performance right around a PS4 for probably about 50-60 watts. Either increase eDRAM or change the main memory bus to 256-bit and your LPDDR4 RAM could clock in at over 100GB/sec giving it pretty good memory bandwidth. Using the tiling approach that Nvidia has, this would give them similar bandwidth to a PS4 (140GB/sec effective). 

I dunno if Nintendo wants to offer different models or a "seperate console" at first though, they probably want to make hay with the hybrid concept (one device that does it all) and having a seperate home console model muddies that message. 

That rumor is complete bonkers. There's no way Nintendo would use a Power 8 CPU or go with only 4GB of RAM, or put the hardware of Wii U (both CPU and RAM) inside the NX console.

That said, no, I don't think today's Nintendo would make a big console. That said, if they go with a closed liquid cooler, the necessary size of the device could be a lot smaller, with most of it coming from the optical drive... which we now know that won't have.

Oh, and stop hypothesizing about Nintendo using not two, but now 3 Tegra chips. There's a reason why no console manufacturer uses multiple processors, and that's because they're a nightmare to develop for. That, and also because their theoretical performance won't have a perfect scale.