NVIDIA CEO talks up Switch, why partnering with Nintendo made sense

[Pemalite]

FunFan said:

Pemalite said:

It wasn't an afterthought. It was just added in late. Sony's focus was on that terrible CPU.

And if you read the link you provided, they knew early on that running games purely on the SPU's was impossible.

Having to delay a console for a year due to a design oversight is equal to knowing early on? The RSX was a last minute fix, after the engineers accepted they done fucked up. Accept the truth.

Also the RSX had anything but a big profit margin, according to Nvidia themselves.

RSX was not last minuit.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/57390-sony-renews-nvidias-console-chip-contract

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1719/9

As you can see, there is a ton of information on the RSX chip, which means they would have likely had working RSX silicon in 2003 - 2004. It takes years to design and plan for these chips.
The GPU that RSX is derived from was already on the market in mid 2005.

The Playstation 3 didn't release untill late 2006/Early 2007 depending on region. So we already had RSX information several years before the console even launched. That's public information. Companies have internal plans that date back allot farther than that usually.

The Cell also lacks much of the vital components to... You know. Render graphics. Sony, IBM, Toshiba et' all would have known this. Their engineers aren't stupid idiots.
The Cell would have had all it's internal and external buses planned at an early stage to interface with DRAM, Chipsets and the GPU. You can't go back at the last minuit, whack a GPU in and call it a day. The Chipset/CPU needs to support it too.

Also. There are profits... And then there are nVidia/Intel/Apple profits. Half a billion dollars in royalties might be something nVidia could sneeze at... But AMD loves it. And that doesn't account for all the other extra fee's they get either.

Tegra has never been a high-profit part. Ever. Period. RSX was likely more profitable over the long term. Especially once all those pretty fee's started to accumulate over the decade.
In-fact. Tegra often looses nVidia money.
http://techreport.com/news/29288/nvidia-revenue-and-profits-rise-for-its-fiscal-q3
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/09/14/when-will-nvidias-tegra-turn-profitable.aspx