curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:
More likely the Tegra chips consume more electricity than people think.
That Shield Console with the Tegra X1 consumes almost *20 watts* when it's really being pushed ... that's a ridiculous power draw for a mobile chip.
That would kill that battery in the Shield console in like 50 minutes.
The K1 even is not 5 watts max .... Nvidia admits it's 5-8 watts and can even peak at 11 watts. There's a reason cell phone makers passed on the chip, it's way too power hungry for smaller devices like that, it's even tough for a lot of tablets to handle.
http://www.greenbot.com/article/2879437/everything-you-need-to-know-about-nvidias-new-tegra-x1-chip.html
You can't just devote your entire electrical "budget" to your GPU either ... your CPU, your RAM, your LCD screen, your WiFi antenna, your flash memory, etc. all need electricity too, those don't magically run for free.
If we take the battery that's in the Tegra K1 tablet (5200 Mah, 19.75 Watt Hours) ... that means divided the 19.75 by 3 hours (lets say 3 hours is the minimum a portable device needs), that gives you an energy "budget" of 6.5 watts per hour, you can't exceed that or your battery life goes under 3 hours. That's 6.5 watts for *everything*, not just the GPU too.
My guess is you will see with the Switch that hackers will try to "trick" the system into running in docked mode when it's actually undocked, but you'll also see that the battery dies in like one hour in that case.
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DF timed the Shield tablet at 3 hours of battery life when running a PS3/360 caliber game. If it could do that in 2014, Switch should be able to have decent battery life while running faster than just 30% of a stock X1.
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Which game was that? We can see pretty clearly that the Switch can run Wii U/PS3/360 tier graphics from the trailer, what difference does it make what the clock speed is if that's the end result.
A Shield console runs at 19 watts max power output. We can do some simple math here, the Switch version is apparently 76% of a full clock Tegra X1.
So 76% of 19 watts means the docked Switch should be running at around 14-15 watts docked.
That is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too hot for a mobile device unless you have an absolutey monstrous battery. That would kill even a laptop battery in under 3 hours.
So lets assume Nintendo is using a mid-to-larger sized battery ... 6000 MaH sounds about right ... you'd have to get that 14-15 watts of docked Switch down to 4-5 watts. Hence a downclock to 1/3.
There's nothing really terribly surprising here. You can't magically bend the laws of battery usage.
