| OneTime said: I doubt that Nvidia will invest in mobile GPUs at this point. The Tegra never really caught on in mobile: the Switch is basically the only customer for it. Nintendo will need to find another vendor for the next Switch (of which there are plenty in the mobile space). |
nVidia is continuing to invest and improve it's mobile Tegra lineup.
The Switch used Tegra Maxwell, technology that came out in 2015.
From there nVidia released Tegra Pascall in 2016..
Tegra Volta in 2019...
And we have Tegra Orin in 2021 likely using Ampere or Hopper.
Tegra is also used in Embedded Systems (Jetson), Vehicles (Drive), Shield (TV), VR Headsets (Magic Leap) and compute/A.I applications, it's not just about Tablets and Phones.
Heck even when Switch released nVidia had Tegra GPU's which could be 50% faster at the same TDP.
OneTime said:
If Nvidia don't produce a decent chip, I can guarantee that Nintendo will go elsewhere. Potentially there may be an Nvidia laptop chip they can switch to, but that wouldn't be a direct Tegra replacement either. Mobile chips are mostly compatible with each other (it's all just Vulkan toolkit, there isn't really an Nvidia-only toolset these days). Nintendo could look to Samsung or maybe a custom ARM Mali GPU - those guys have the mass market to do R&D. Nvidia never built a marketshare in that space - I always assumed that they just gave Nintendo a good deal to cut their losses on Tegra... |
Yeah. Nintendo will go where the technology goes. - They don't give a crap about making a clean break and doing what Nintendo does.
But Tegra is still improving.
| Bofferbrauer2 said: Orin is rated for a TDP of 65W, that's way too much for a handheld format like the Switch. Also, it's heavily axed towards Deep Learning and AI, too much for it's performance to not become squandered or very hard to tap on (similar to the Cell in the PS3). I'd be more expecting a new Tegra chip with more consumer-related hardware, which NVidia probably wants to develop anyway for it's Shield line of products, which uses the same chips as the Switch does. In other words, I'm more expecting something with 4-8 Tegra cores (Carmel or Hercules) and 384-512 Cuda Cores (Turing or next-gen) and a 128bit bus of 8-16GB LPDDR4X or LPDDR5 without too many bells or whistles, as they currently are too taxing for a handheld format, even in 7 or 5nm. And that should be enough to get PS4-like performance from a handheld anyway |
Orin will be scalable just like Tegra X1/Maxwell.
Configurable TDP's and Semi-Custom alterations are a thing you know.
Tegra Xavier for example has 10w, 15w and 30w operating modes.
Plus we don't have all the information on what Orin actually is.
| JEMC said: I don't think Nintendo will jump to 7, much less 5nm tech, and the chip will also have to use very little power to make it suitable for a handheld without burning the owners hands. |
7nm should be very old, mature and cheap by the time we start looking at a Switch 2.
| Bofferbrauer2 said: But wouldn't that make taking the Switch out of the dock risky? I mean, that should get pretty hot like this... As for the Surface Pro-X, again, try giving that one consistent high load. 2.1TFlops are it's peak performance, but it's far from holding those under full load. Case in point: It's supposed to be at 2.1 TFlops, but it's graphics score just edges out the UHD 620 in Intel 8250U laptops in 3D Mark's Night Raid graphics benchmark and get's easily beaten by a Vega 8 in a Ryzen 5 2500U despite the latter only claiming 1.1 TFlops. In other words, the SQ1 at ~7W wouldn't do much better than the Tegra, if at all. |
The emphasis on flops is misleading, it's not the be-all, end-all.
www.youtube.com/@Pemalite
