By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
SmileyAja on 19 April 2017
Edit Thread
Bofferbrauer said:
Soundwave said:

Now Xavier (Tegra X3) is reportedly supposed to do close to Drive PX2 performance .... at only 20 watts! The current Switch for reference runs at 15 watts in docked mode. Nvidia uses a different terms to grade these chips on performance .... DLTOPS (learning FLOPS basically), so Drive PX2 does 24 DLTOPS, Xavier does 20 DLTOPS. Doing some basic math that works out to about 6.6 TFLOPS for the Nvidia Xavier. 

That's insane performance for a 20 watt part! Now the Xavier at just under 300mm is a pretty big chip (512 CUDA cores). The current Switch Tegra X1 SoC is only a bit over 121mm. So that Xavier chip is very big.  However lets say we slash that in half ... to 256 CUDA cores, you could have 3.3 TFLOP performance docked at only 10 watts, and 1.65 TFLOP if you cut it again in half for a undocked mode at 5 watts for the chip. Basically PS4 level performance in portable mode, and almost PS4 Pro in docked mode. 

Not too shabby huh? And this chip will be done by the end of this year, so by 2019/2020, if Ninendo wants to use it as a mid-gen refresh ... it should be more than mature enough to go into a mass produced $300 device. Lets remember the current Tegra X1 is a 2015-era chip, that Nintendo is using in 2017.

Some caveats though:

1. 20W is the TDP, not the consumption, which is likely higher than that.

2. The TFLOPS are in half precision, so cut the numbers by 2 to get single precision.

3. Needs good cooling to keep the chip from throttling down.

4. cutting the CUDA cores down doesn't exactly halve the consumption of the chip. Also, lowering clock speed might be a better way to gain on efficiency.

5. Considering what the Chip is made for, it (sadly) probably comes at a premium price, especially if it needs the platform built around it to actually work.

All in all, what I could see with an X3 based Chip in an upcoming Switch would be twice the performance at most, as too much has to be cut to fit into the handheld.

Basically what BoffferBraurer said; you're making a lot of assumptions here and we know very little details about the SoC itself. I wouldn't jump the gun that fast, especially expecting revisions for some time.

As far as I can see, Nintendo designed the system to be as universal as possible in terms of the form factor. If they really need extra horsepower they can raise the clocks a bit, the Joy - Con are very modular and sized well enough for most hands, so is the system at a size which is just portable and light enough. Making a docked - only or handheld - only Switch also goes against the entire name and marketing, and they probably don't want to cause any confusion in terms of what the system can do. All in all sticking to the same system for a while is their best bet and also allows them to eventually drop the price by a bit or start bundling in games.

Also, it wouldn't be called the X3 since it isn't MaXwell based.

Unrelated - Xaiver - like SoCs running at full capacity would provide very good performance while being cheaper, smaller and consume less power than an adequate CPU + GPU combo. With Microsoft working on Windows 10 for ARM platforms, modular ARM PCs could prove interesting. A casual web browsing / light gaming machine built with phone components could easily cost around $50 with a MTK / Rockchip SoC and 8GB LPDDR4 / LPDDR3 RAM, and more powerful machines could prove capable for gaming.