When will an improved switch-hardware be released ?

[Pemalite]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Pemalite said:

A chip built at 7nm and a chip built at 14/16nm that is the exact same physical size? It will be cheaper to manufacture on 14/16nm.
Wafer costs go up every time you shrink.

@bolded: That's why I said about the same, not exactly the same. Sure, the 7nm will be more expensive, but not by much.

Nope. 7nm will be more expensive, it's actually been a trend for a long time now. It will take a couple years for TSMC/Samsungs 7nm to be price competitive.


Global Foundries is even stepping away from 7nm entirely... Meaning less capacity and competition at that node than say... 14/16nm.
https://www.anandtech.com/comments/13277/globalfoundries-stops-all-7nm-development

But in terms of fabrication... The bulk of IC's are 55nm and larger, with production of chips between 90nm and 180nm being 27% of the semiconductor market.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

@italic: Nope, more like the original meanings, like 16nm and 12nm being the full nodes while 14nm and 10nm being half nodes. GF calling their upgraded 14nm a 12nm process was pretty awkward for me in that regard.
That said, I don't remember seeing any ARM chip being produced in any 12nm process, they all seemed to go straight to a 10nm process. I doubt anything else than Ryzen+ will be produced in that process either.

12nm is an extension of 14nm anyway... It was made that way to allow easy porting of 14/16nm chips.

The point I am trying to convey is that "nm" isn't actually representing an accurate geometrical size of shrinks.
I.E. Intels 10nm is actually in many aspects superior to TSMC's 7nm.

Ryzen is a large and profitable chip for AMD, so they can get away using a leading manufacturing processes.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

I don't expect DDR5 in any Switch revision. Just wanted to point out with this that when CPU transition to another RAM standard, the old standard generally drops markedly in price. Hence why I followed it with saying that by then 8GiB DDR4 shouldn't be more expensive then compared to the 4GiB when the Switch launched.

All I am saying is that Ram is a commodity price so it will fluctuate wildly. 16GB of DDR4 for example today is more expensive than 32GB of DDR3 Ram I bought 8 years ago.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

I have a feeling that the bandwith is already a bottleneck on the Switch, hence why I wanted to widen it more than the increase in GPU processing power.

That is because the lack of bandwidth is a bottleneck on the Switch, the bandwidth it has is generally not doing it any favors at 1080P.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Switch corrently is only using LPDDR4-1600, resulting in measly 25.6 GB/s bandwith. I agree that going all the way to LPDDR4-2666 while also doubling the channel with to 128 bit is probably overkill (LPDDR4-2133 would probably suffice), but 83 GB/s would certainly be a safer bet for no bandwith choking than just going 128bit and keeping the LPDDR4-1600

You are only looking at the raw bandwidth numbers.
The Switch actually has more available bandwidth than that.

In general... 50GB/s would probably be a good spot to be, it's roughly how much the Geforce 1030 has, which is a decent chip for 720P gaming. - Also find it not to be Bandwidth constrained either from when I did some overclocking testing.