| JEMC said: I'm not sure all the above goes to me, but I'll reply to some of it. When Nvidia revealed the X2, they said that they would use the 16nm manufacturing process, so no matter if Nintendo goes with the X1 or the X2, the SoC will be made with that process. When I said that Nintendo could go with a bigger GPU, I meant that once the 10nm is up and running, Nintendo could launch a revision of the Switch featuring a SoC with more shader cores of the same kind (either Pascal or Maxwell) and newer ARM cores. That would be their Pro/Scorpion-like machine. Then, in another three or four years, is when they could launch a successor with Nvidia's newer architecture. And yes, I agree with you that making the API more abstract would be useful in the long term, but in the short term that would mean not being able to use all the power inside the Switch. I don't know what to say about the last paragraph, because I've never said that. |
The last line indeed isn't meant for you ...
As far as porting Pascal to 10nm and starting with a new microachitecture later on that would be doable ...
Short term impact is minimized since games are taking longer than ever to make so locking API design to hardware early on is not a good idea for building a solid foundation for backwards compatibility plus there are other ways to expose hardware functionality writing in custom GPU microcode ...
