Cartridges or optical discs?

[Pemalite]

fatslob-:O said:

Pemalite said:

Switch should have an advantage on random access times though.

In general... The Switch isn't breaking 90MB/s of bandwidth regardless if it is cart or MicroSD... And because of such, the mechanical drives in the consoles are actually faster at sustained reads and writes. (The Optical Disks are much slower than all of them however.)

As do all flash based technology since they have the lower access latencies ... 

@Bold You can say that again since Nintendo hardly gives a damn about how fast their cartridges are if their willing to use monstrosity such as this ... (1-bit bus width, 45 MHz clock all for a whopping 5.6 MB/s!) 

My internet is faster at downloading than their 3DS cartridge read speads LOL ... (I wouldn't rule out Switch carts being possibly slower)

Well. The Switch's  cart transfer rate seems to be pretty competitive to MicroSD as per Digital Foundry's testing.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-best-microsd-cards-for-switch-loading-time-comparison

So we can summise that it is something like 80-90MB/s. Nothing ground breaking, but not entirely useless either.

Spindel said:

I never said that I want a cartrige that physically looks like the 8-bit, 16-bit and N64 ones.

Fair point.
With that, even mobile carts like Gameboy/DS/3DS have a fair amount of empty space as well. Certainly enough space for a Co-Processor that does not use a heatsink and fan.

Spindel said:

What I want is the ability for co-processors (whitch will require a bit roomier cartriges than the DS, 3DS and switch ones.

The main issue is building a Co-Processor that is powerful enough over the host machine whilst not requiring a heatsink and fan.

Take the SuperFX chip in the SNES, that was orders-of-magnitude faster than the SNES CPU, but it also didn't use a heatsink or fan... We simply can't do that anymore as chips have gotten orders-of-magnitude faster and more power hungry.

Now we could *potentially* still have Co-Processors that are designed for very specific tasks such as decompression of textures, but that only becomes worth it if you are extremely constrained by the hardware which just doesn't happen as much these days.

Spindel said:

It doesn't need to be a fully blown GPU (like the Super FX and FX 2 chips). But I could see a posibility for maybe a ARM chip (which doesn't neccesairly needs a big heatsink, if it needs any at all) fore some extra processing power for thing like maybe AI (yeah yeah I know ARM are more general purpose and not suited for AI but you get the point). Or a custom chip that helps to allow for some newer generation shader that is not supported for the aging hardware in the console for crisper graphics (even if I see new chipsets for stuff that is mostly related to under the hood calculations over graphical expandability since the graphics race is tiring and in most of the powerhouse consoles and PC I feel like the big budget games spend all the budget on visuals and forget gameplay).

Well. Such a chip would be extremely slow, orders-of-magnitude slower than the host machines processor... So the performance gains would be fairly marginal.

I mean... I would *love* for that to be a focus again, it's just not going to be all that realistic, but I guess this thread is entirely about your personal preferences, not what is realistically achievable with todays technology.