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[JEMC]

caffeinade said:

JEMC said:

I don't care much about smartphones, and I tend to upgrade only when the one I use starts to fail, so I only have two reasons to care about LPDDR5:

1) That means that DDR5 for PCs is getting closer, which is both good and bad, as always.

2) That kind of RAM paired with a tweaked Nvidia Xavier SoC (details were revealed yesterday, with 8 Carmel AMR64 CPU cores, 512 Volta GPU cores, 16GB 256-bit LPDDR4 memory interface and capable of operating at 10, 15 and/or 30W) would make for a great Switch 2, capable of offering equal or better graphics than PS4/X1. But I think this is not the best thread to talk about it.

"NVIDIA mentioned that the Xavier SOC is built on a TSMC 12nm process node and houses 9 billion transistors crammed underneath a 350 mm2 die area."
You're going to need to do more than slightly tweak this to be able to put it into a Switch 2 type device.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/2820-official-nvidia-gtx-1080-ti-specs-announced
Compare the die size and/or transistor count to a high end desktop GPU and you get a chip somewhere in-between a 1080 and a 1080Ti.

The CPU portion of the SoC would likely blow the Xbox One and PS4 out of the water.
It'd probably be close to a console generation's worth of power ahead of the CPUs in the 8th gen machines.
Though I've not seen any benchmarks.

Yes, it may have as much transistors as a "1085" card, but it has a max TDP of 30W, not 200. Chip size matters, but power consumptions matters too.

And let's not forget that an hypothetical Switch 2 with the Xavier SoC wouldn't run at its max 30W mode, but it's more likely to use the 15W one when docked, which is exactly what the actual Switch uses.

As for the tweaks I talk about...

Pemalite said:

JEMC said:

I don't care much about smartphones, and I tend to upgrade only when the one I use starts to fail, so I only have two reasons to care about LPDDR5:

1) That means that DDR5 for PCs is getting closer, which is both good and bad, as always.

2) That kind of RAM paired with a tweaked Nvidia Xavier SoC (details were revealed yesterday, with 8 Carmel AMR64 CPU cores, 512 Volta GPU cores, 16GB 256-bit LPDDR4 memory interface and capable of operating at 10, 15 and/or 30W) would make for a great Switch 2, capable of offering equal or better graphics than PS4/X1. But I think this is not the best thread to talk about it.

I am a teach-enthusiast through and through. :P
Xavier+LPDDR5 with 100-200GB/s of bandwidth would be intense, but I don't expect that in a Switch successor, mostly because of how large and power hungry that chip is... And the fact it likely doesn't have an appropriate memory controller for LPDDR5 support anyway.

The real question is if desktop DDR5 will be deviating from LPDDR5 and to how much of an extent, keen for DDR5 to hurry up though, mostly for the benefits it brings to APU's.

Well, the memory controller would be one of the tweaks I talked about as Xavier uses a LPDDR4 controller that would need to get updated to use the new memory.

The other tweak, tho this one would be harder to make, is to get rid of the Tensor Cores of Volta, as they are mostly useless for gaming (except Ray Tracing, but no one should expect that with this chip). That could lead to a smaller and more efficient chip... or they could use the extra space for something else.

 

As for the DDR5 standard, the article you posted said that there isn't one yet, and Samsung has simply gone ahead and made its own chips that may need to get changed once the standard gets announced. So trying to guess how the desktop DDR5 RAM would be from the Samsung chips is a bit of a stretch.