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curl-6 on 20 December 2016
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Pemalite said:
curl-6 said:

It's not a guess though, they didn't guess anything, they were told by developers.

Switch cannot be close to Xbox One in power, the laws of thermodynamics and electricity make such power in a handheld form factor unviable with today's technology. Anybody expecting that kind of performance was uninformed.

You are right. The laws of thermodynamics does apply. To a point.
Aka. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed only transferred or transformed.
But what happens if you take wasted energy that is normally transformed into heat and recycle it via a resonent clock mesh? You reduce power consumption.

The energy the SoC consumes has to go somewhere, a large portion is transformed into wasted heat, thus SoC designers take various approaches to reduce power consumption and increase performance... Like a focus on FP16 performance, Power Gating, Big.Little core configurations, using more energy efficient but lower clocking transisters... You name it.
Big power hungry chips likes what the Xbox One and Playstation 4 use have less of a focus on power consumption, there simply isn't a need for it.

However, Tegra is a mobile-centric chip. It is a different microarchitecture, has different design goals and different power and leakage characteristics than large Graphics Core Next chips.
The Xbox One's GPU capabilities are already almost a half decade old. - Fabrication and chip design has come a long way since then, nVidia has leveraged what it learned with earlier Tegra designs and came up with Maxwell... And then farther refined that with Pascal.
The end result is a massive advantage in nVidia's favour in regards to performance per watt.

Next year the Volta powered Tegra should drop, doubling the performance of the Pascal based Tegra. - Combined with architectural improvements, it should be about an Xbox One in terms of GPU capability, if not better depending on clock rate, still built at 16nm Finfet as well.

You do get better performance per watt, yeah, but at the end of the day, Xbox One S can consume more than 70 watts when running a game, while a portable will have to make do with about a tenth of that in order to have decent battery life while not only powering the CPU/GPU/RAM, but also the screen.