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Soundwave on 11 September 2016
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JEMC said:
Soundwave said:

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.

Or they could just scale up the chip of the Tegra X2 (lets presume) that they're using to be 3x more powerful (768 CUDA cores vs 256 CUDA cores for instance).

Though Nvidia already uses the Tegra X2 is multi-processor configs, that Drive PX2 system uses two Tegra X2's in unison. 

The truth is I don't think even if Nintendo offered this setup that they'd want devs really pushing the console to max ability. What they would want is the games to be made first and foremost for the *portable setup*, and then developers would be allowed to use the extra grunt to maybe get a home version that's 1080P + 60fps versus say 600P + 30fps on the portable. But the portable model has to be the focus. And that's IF they even offer a console model NX, which at this point I'm unsure of. 

It will likely use the same chip/tech as the portable NX. So Tegra X1/2 or whatever customized version of it that Nintendo is using. Just scaled up. They're not going to spend a shit ton of money on a completely separate custom GPU design, nor would it make much sense in a unified software ecosystem (there's a reason the iPad and iPhone use the same family of processors, it makes software compatibility easy; the iPad just gets better versions of said chip).

But the basic idea ... Hybrid NX has 1 Tegra X2 custom processor. OK, great. Now could you put that in a Wii-sized console (remember the disc drive is gone) and scale it up to the point where it matches a PS4 more or less running off walled power? Yeah, I think that would be possible with not a lot of fuss. Would Nintendo want to offer this option is the bigger queston.