| padib said: Good point, but that's assuming that the bus would not be upgraded in a V2, which is unlikely if the dock was intended to augment the capabilities like you mentioned. Also, I want to ask the question of serious upgrades in the slab itself. Perhaps with a modified flattened form of ssd, it would be possible to sandwich a large drive inside the casing. Do you know if such a tech exists? |
You would need to ditch USB entirely and go to some other standard that piggy-backs off PCI-E... As although USB 4 might kick bandwidth up to 5GB/s that is still orders-of-magnitude less than 16x PCI-E 4.0 lanes which provides 64GB/s.
Although... Because the Switch operates at lower levels of performance capabilities to start with, it shouldn't need more than 8GB/s for a multi-GPU configuration to become viable unless the Dock didn't include it's own DRAM buffer.... But again, that latency issue would get in the middle of the problem.
And there is the other potential issue of compatibility being broken if Nintendo abandons USB and goes with a PCI-E based interconnect.
Nintendo would simply be better off adopting a faster Tegra chip like the X2, Xavier or Orin and upsell it as a Switch-Pro rather than take a Nintendo 64/Sega Gensis route of different peripherals with different performance modes that only die-hards would probably purchase anyway.
As for the internal drive... The Switch already technically uses an SSD, so did the Wii U and Wii... I mean, it's only a very simple and rudimentary drive (It's just some NAND on a very narrow bus with a simple controller integrated on the motherboard) that sacrifices performance for cost reasons... But there is a ton of room for Nintendo to expand the internal storage capacity and performance by several multiples.
| Louie said: I expect a "New Switch" to be released sometime in 2021. It's not going to be much more powerful (probably a x2 increase in speed), but it will make the system feel fresher. Currently the Switch has two modes for games: Mode 1: Handheld play Mode 2: Docked play I expect the "New Switch" to be able to play games in "Mode 2" (docked) when playing portable, as that would be a very simple solution for the user. Alternatively, users would be able to play games in "Mode 1", increasing battery life. Nintendo could also add a third mode, a sort of "performance mode", which will increase visual fidelity when playing on TV. But, the revision is not going to revolve around stronger hardware, it's just gonna be marketed as more modern. We might also see a "New Switch Lite" at some point. And knowing Nintendo, maybe an ultra-low-cost revision. |
The Switch has more "performance modes" though on top of that which includes various performance and power implications.
It's not just Docked and Undocked.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
