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bonzobanana on 13 November 2016
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Miyamotoo said:
bonzobanana said:

Rumour yes but  a reliable source and realistic spec for Nintendo.  The gpu units could be pascal based but that might be a doable upgrade on the development kit without too much impact elsewhere. DDR4 is the latest technology not something Nintendo normally has. 

Nintendo don't really pay attention to memory speed, they put in the cheapest nastiest memory in wii u and then had a 32MB of basically cache in the GPU to compensate. Pretty much a way of keeping speed up despite using cheap memory.  It's quite possible Nintendo will take the same approach here. Remove what they feel is un-necessary in the main SOC so they can use cheap main memory. 

The development kit as stated is about 3x wii u and if the SOC has some frame buffer cache memory to compensate for the 25.6GB/s main memory then I don't think there is an issue. Laptops with 500 gflops approx integrated gpu's have memory around 25.6GB/s. Seems a good fit for a 720p tablet.

I see no reason at this point to stray from the development kit spec. It makes sense on every level with a few nips and tucks before the final release hardware. It's all guesswork though but I disagree with your points mainly on the basis that it seems to have no connection with Nintendo's past record on hardware. Your view is more about desired spec rather than expected spec. It may well be that Nintendo have changed their approach because of the failure of the wii u but then it doesn't look like they have changed policy based on providing a hybrid console gimmick and not competing head on with the competition. It still looks like a product which they can cost low as possible because it doesn't compete with ps4 or xbox one.

But whole Tegra thing is latest tech (espacily Pascal based) that Nintendo usualy dont do, and Nintendo didn't had that from GC. Thats point, they going with different strategy compared to last two gens, they going with very modern tech/architecture, just not with strong power thats on pair with PS4. And going with Pascal based has much more sense than going with Maxwell based because of battery life of Switch, also Nvidia did said "The high-efficiency scalable process includes an NVIDIA GPU based on the same architecture as the world’s top-performing GeForce gaming graphics cards". And Nintendo do pay attentions of memory performance compared to rest of hardware.

Yes, but like I wrote, realible sources (same like few industry experts that WSJ mentioned) said that Switch is Pascal based, and Pascal Tegra has 50/GB/s. Realible sources also said that rumoured dev kit is close to real, but not 100% accurate. Maybe Pascal based kits werent ready so they used Maxxwel based instead or something, remember Eurogamer reported that dev kits had very laudable active cooling. Nintendo is not competing with XB1/PS4 only with power, but they will have very modern tech/architecture (actualy more modern than XB1/PS4) that they will be using in next hardwares too. Of Course they still want to offer something different than competition but they are aware that Wii U architecture/tech is very outdated and they want very modern tech/architecture that will much easier to work with now and in future.

We shall see how it turns out. Any nvidia chipset could be described as same architecture as world's top performing geforce gaming graphics cards. Nvidia have clearly stated a custom Tegra chip so Nintendo have selected the features they want based on price.  

What I'm expecting;

4GB memory

4 Arm A57 64 bit cores

dual channel DDR3 or single channel 64bit DDR4 of 25.6GB/s bandwidth memory to match dev kit

GPU performance while docked of somewhere around 400-600 gflops

In portable mode probably 200-300 gflops

To be honest I can see it going above or below this. It my middle position for the moment.

Very happy to be completely wrong though and Nintendo to have gone as high as possible with the spec but I just can't see that at all. It will be costed down to the sweet spot of the lowest possible price that offers reasonable performance. In a hybrid system that isn't necessary a bad thing if it makes the portable side have better battery runtime.