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[JEMC]

caffeinade said:

JEMC said:

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...

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).

Yes, Nintendo is pretty cheap, which is why they may go for an off the shelf product rather than paying tens or hundreds of millions to Nvidia to develop a custom SoC. And also because it's Nintendo, them going with Xavier for the Switch 2 is likely as by the time they launch it, it will be "old" and cheaper. Heck, by then it may also be available at 7nm, making it smaller and less power hungry too!

But well, Nintendo being Ninendo, they could go with an X2 for the Switch 2 and call it a day.

Pemalite said:

caffeinade said:

**there's no need to quote the same post again**

Nintendo Switch's SoC is 232mm2.
Xavier is about 300m2.

That is roughly a 30% chip size increase.
However... 12nm is very high yielding anyway, so that increase in chip size should be economical for Nintendo.

Xavier most certainly was built for gaming, it just so happens it is good at other tasks as well.

With that in mind... I think the better idea would be to take Tegra X2, port it over to the 12nm process and dial up the clock rates, Pascal isn't a big deviation from Maxwell from a feature set perspective... But can hit higher clocks for better performance. (Plus improved Delta Colour Compression for a little more bandwidth.)

Wouldn't a gaming device like the Switch benefit more from having twice the shader cores instead that a higher frequency?