Soundwave said:
Even when the TX1 first came out though it was in cheap devices ... $199.99 US Sheild console was available .... two years ago. TX2 is just the natural newer version of that chip, it's not going to cost like 2x as much, just like Apple doesn't pay magically double for the new GPU in every iPhone they buy, even though iPhone's generally double in horsepower every year. That's just the natural progression of mobile chips, this is also new territory for Nintendo because the Switch chipset basically has no customizations really. So Nintendo can just keep use the Tegra line of chips, much like Apple does with PowerVR chips for every generation of iPhone and iPad. It's for the best really, Nintendo's overly customized chipsets with weird IBM CPUs and eDRAM pools and exotic memory types and all that wasn't really benefitting the games and it made revising the chip or dropping the price problematic because no one else but Nintendo was using that tech. It also means Nintendo has options now ... if they wanted to do this in the past and their chip was more custom, redesigning the chip for whatever reason cost money because it was a custom design only they would use. The way it is now, Nvidia is making these chips (Tegra X2 for example) anyway, so Nintendo can just let them do all the R&D and use their chip basically whenever they feel like. |
I agree that the price difference isn't much. What I am getting at is perhaps Nintendo wanted to go TX2 but NVIDIA cut them such a good deal to use up their TX1 first, and by good I mean dump them (i.e. at cost to manufacture price) to get rid of them, so Nintendo probably though woo extra $20 profit per console.
