Switch development has access to 3 CPUs and 3GB RAM

[arthurchan35]

etking said:

One core and 1 GB of RAM is wasted for no reason. Why don't they use dynamic resource allocation and more efficient programming, so that the unused core and unused memory can be used for games?

You do not need a whole core for the OS and you do not need 1GB of RAM. Instead they should kill / freeze and swap out everything that is not required while gaming. Encryption, security and networking takes a small amount of CPU and memory, but not enough to reserve 25% of all system resources available. This is not an efficient design decision but it can and should be changed.

I had the same question before, like pretty much all consoles, they dont give full resources to games, not like a general computing maching - computer.

The reason is most because if you allow using vitural address space and virtual memory for a console, it is actually less efficient. 

Implementation of Virtual address space and virtual memory in a computer is quiet "costly", but for a computer, it is designed to run "many" programs/processes at same time, because they are switching soooo frequently, the cost of using virtual address space alongside some kinda generic scheduling algorithm is relatively low comparing some other solutions. However, it is obvious not the case for a console, you will end up wasting CPU resource and swaping memory in to and out from disk inefficiently(this is a strong performs hit).

Also in order to translate addresses, you will need either a software translation solution or a hardware translation solution(like a MMU in a computer CPU).

Software solution is too slow and hardware solution consumes too much power(maybe).

 

And stablity and predicatablity are strong concerns for developing games on a console, as well. Giving games a fixed number of physical memory and CPU resources, I think, help a lot.