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caffeinade on 20 July 2018
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JEMC said:
caffeinade said:

"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:

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.

Nintendo is pretty cheap, they're not going to pay for all that silicon.
Physical size matters in mobile devices.
A base Tegra X1 has a TDP of 15 watts, not 20, meaning you'd have to cut it down even further to reach stock X1 power consumption.
The Switch uses an underclocked X1.

Xavier wasn't built for gaming.
It will only be decent at gaming by brute force.

Nintendo would be better served with an SoC that is custom designed for their needs.
And have a GPU that is balanced for the task at hand.
They'd probably want to find the optimal frequency for their architecture, 512 core will probably be too much to hit the sweet spot.
Also we don't know how Volta compares to their gaming architecture, in games (if they are indeed separate things).