NightlyPoe said:
Heh, well fortunately, the Switch is not a particularly "disruptive" piece of technology. Games on Switch will be more or less the same as they would be on Sony or Microsoft. The handheld availibility is merely a value-added feature. The question for me is how long until the hybrid design becomes industry standard. |
Maybe MS and Sony will in future include hybrids in their range of home console models, but being a lot more power-whorish than Ninty, I'm quite sure they'll keep on offering full-power standard and premium home-only models too. And they'll have to wait anyhow, as the undocked hybrid being the lowest common denominator, it will have anyway to offer some perforamnce increase compared to 8th gen PS4 and XBOne base models (if not in GPU power, at least in CPU power and RAM size, to offer the capability to handle larger and more complex game worlds and higher level of interaction), and this will take some more years to be not just possible, but also viable. Not many years, as already now Ninty can offer quite a beefy hybrid, if considered a portable, for $300, and AMD and GlobalFoundries have just announced they'll skip 10nm process to concentrate on the 7nm one and accelerate the transition to it, and this will allow them to mostly fill the remaining gap with Intel and NVidia, so in a very few years we'll have a lot more competition across the whole CPU, GPU and APU range from low-end and embedded up to high-end, this will be an ideal situation for console manufacturers too, as if it weren't good enough news that AMD in the short term would concentrate on Vega GPUs, not weaker Polaris ones, for its next Zen CPU-based APUs.
Waiting for 7nm will allow Sony and MS (and Ninty too for Switch successor and/or possible upgraded Switch model) to get enough computing power at a low enough power consumption and price.
