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curl-6 on 04 January 2017
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Soundwave said:
Pemalite said:

You don't need to believe it to be true.

Anandtech ran tests and the Tegra X1 was roughly twice as powerful as the K1 in best case scenario's. Head over to Anandtech and check for yourself.

Correct. It is also a stationary platform that competes with other stationary platforms.
And your second assumption is also correct, the Switch is not the device I wanted from a hardware perspective... But to suggest it has somehow skewed my perception on the platforms that it is competing with is entirely inaccurate as before the hardware reveal I often stated on these forums that it was to compete with every platform due to it's form factor.
My position hasn't changed. And nor will it.

I didn't expect a 2.5 TFLOP console (And you know my position on flops. It is about as useful as Sandpaper being used as toilet paper in the context you just used it in.)

I expected "Good enough" performance which was a full rate Tegra or a semi-custom AMD chip.

No need to feel confident.
That is exactly what will happen. The Switch should be able to present games that are better than most other mobile games as games will target the hardware and it's specific nuances.

But you just used a theoretical performance number just prior?

And flagship devices even throttled will still be faster than the Switch.
I don't think you fully comprehend how much Nintendo has castrated Tegra?

Granted the Switch's performance is still between the Wii U and Xbox One, that hasn't changed since we discovered it was using Tegra, it is just closer to the Wii U now.

They underclocked the CPU by 90%. That should have been enough TDP to guarentee a much higher clocked GPU out of the Tegra than what we received.
Nintendo likely decided to cheap out on the battery.

Screens use a stupidly large amount of power.

The iPad Pro is a larger, brighter, higher resolution screen, it is where the majority of it's power consumption ends up, hence it requires a larger battery to compensate.

The Switch is also a thicker device than the iPad Pro.
Manufacturers can use Z depth just as effectively as height and width.

Nintendo should have ditched the Big cores, kept the small cores, underclocked them by 90% and threw more TDP at the GPU. It is as simple as that.

I don't think this is as easy as you paint it. It's not as if the chip isn't there ... they have the chip, it's already paid for, so there's no sense in gimping it for fun.

I've also heard that Google Pixel C tablet throttles its Tegra X1 after 10 whopping minutes. *10 minutes*, lol, Switch needs to operate at a higher performance envelope for 3 hours at least. This is the problem. 

Mobile chips have fancy schmancy stats, but those numbers are only in very specific peak situations. Just like a person can technically run at 40 km/hour ... yes that's technically possible. For about 20 seconds. After 2 minutes of that the person will collapse. 

My guess is Nintendo realized this reality. Because there's no real reason to gimp the chip so hard, they already paid for the chip and even paid for a fan to be inside the device. I'm sure they'd love to be able to run docked mode performance in undocked state. Yes you can save a little bit on battery, but maybe like $4-$5, it's not like a $50 savings. 

If all these mobile chips can run graphics better than a PS3/360 so easily and they're sooooo much more powerful, then where are the games? I don't really buy that it's just because no one wants to try. Most mobile games look well below even PS3/360 level. I think there definitely is an issue with pushing these chips to max performance, what ends up happening is they get too hot and eat too much battery to be pushed that hard for 3 straight hours. 

I have a pretty powerful Macbook Pro that can run Bioshock Infinite, but when I play it without the laptop plugged in, even with low screen brightness, I get maybe 1 hour of battery life. 

No developer is going to pour the kind of budget into an iOS game that allowed high end PS3/360 games to look as good as they do. And due to the wide range of different hardware configurations, you don't get the low-level optimization that you see on fixed hardware.

Eurogamer's spec leak shows a 307MHz clockspeed for Switch in its portable mode, that's just 30% of a fully clocked Tegra X1. The Tegra K1 in the Shield runs at 852MHz, so while X1's Maxwell architecture and higher CUDA core count (192 in Shield, 256 in Switch) make it more efficient per cycle, these advantages are not enough to overcome the nearly 3:1 difference in sheer speed.

Regarding power and battery life, Tegra K1 uses 5 watts (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25618498) and DF say it lasts around 3 hours when running Trine 2.