| Soundwave said: In 2015/16 yes, Tegra X1 was an off the shelf get for Nintendo and was attractively priced because Nvidia was desperate to recoup costs on it. They bet hard that the Tegra line was big for consumer electronic products and in tons of devices like tablets and what not, and largely that vision failed. Nintendo got the chip likely for a steal of a price as a result, otherwise they likely would've wanted a custom chip design where they have input into the chip design. |
You know... I have heard this many times in the past, yet no one has actually provided evidence for this.
Tegra X1 was profitable for nVidia because it was used in nVidia Shield, Jetson, Drive, Google Pixel C.. And was often used in signage, industrial and IoT devices... It actually had a market that raked in millions for nVidia even before the Switch came along.
Nintendo didn't want to spend money on R&D... Just like Sony and Microsoft no longer spend money on R&D developing custom chips anymore, there simply isn't a need when Intel, AMD, Nvidia and ARM do all the hard work for them... And that will continue.
| Soundwave said: The thing is with a Switch successor, this was likely never going to work again, the Tegra chip line isn't some ubiquitous product line that Nvidia makes, they make a few for self driving cars but that is probably for Nvidia right now a small market. There isn't a "Tegra X4" or something for Nintendo to just pick off a shelf and put into a game console because Nvidia basically stopped making traditional successors to the Tegra X1 after the Tegra Parker in 2017 as there wasn't wide enough to demand from other vendors for the Tegra chips. There are Tegra Orin boards but those are for smart cars with a lot of components for A.I. learning, not really suitable for a game system. |
Tegra is scalable. DRIVE isn't the -only- market that Tegra sells into.
nVidia has continued to make "traditional" Tegra chips, it's just the market that it is geared towards is no longer primarily consumer applications.
Tegra Orin is perfectly fine for a gaming system, in-fact that is the exact basis for the next Switch according to these "leaks" (Which should always be taken with a grain of salt. - Remember the leaks that said the Switch was going to use AMD?)
| Soundwave said: The Tegra T239 or "Drake" likely is being made for Nintendo expressly. The codename NVN2 also pretty heavily hints at that as NVN is Nvidia's codename for the current Nintendo Switch. And I'd say if the chip is finished (with the way leaks are coming out on it, I'd say it's either imminent or close to completion) then it's not a wild proposition to say Nintendo is likely on the hook to pay up for it soon. The way console manufacturing/component fees go there could also be a guaranteed royalty fee on top of that too. |
If it's even being made at all.
I don't think you understand the point of an unsubstantiated rumor.
Tegra T239 would be based on Orin, which is definitely "done" at this point as nVidia is actually developing Tegra "Thor".
| Soundwave said: It's quite possible the situation here is Nintendo ordered development of Tegra Drake around 2018 or 2019. 3-4 years sounds about dead on for the amount of time a new chip architecture in the Tegra line would need, so this chip starting to show up in leaks as we've gone on in 2022 would make sense. Now whether Nintendo needs the chip at this point is kind of irrelevant, they're probably going to be on the hook for paying for it and even possibly on the hook for per unit royalty fees (companies like AMD, Nvidia often get a per unit cut and a minimum order guarantee in exchange for giving the vendor a better per unit price). If that's the case I think Nintendo just goes ahead and releases it but will keep their Switch software lineup cross-gen for several more years, just letting the newer system have 4K DLSS-ed versions of those games. |
Development of Orin/T239 was occurring in 2018... And sampled in 2021 with full availability this year.
Chip development takes time, chip designers actually have multiple teams developing chips and leap-frog the releases.
And will absolutely be outdated when Nintendo releases it's next console.
| shikamaru317 said: For starters, Jetson Orin NX is 2 tflop to base Xbox One's 1.3 tflop. |
Teraflops means jack. It's theoretical, not real world. And is never directly comparable between different architectures.
| shikamaru317 said: 2 tflop Ampere GPU should be about 35-40% more powerful than the 1.8 tflop GCN GPU in base PS4 even with the lesser memory bandwidth of LPDDR5 vs PS4's GDDR5. |
Depends on task. Asynchronous compute was GCN's strong point.
But on the topic of bandwidth... We need to remember that modern GPU's have technologies like "Delta Colour Compression" and "Draw Stream Binning Rasterization" and "Tiled based rendering" which increases the available "theoretical" bandwidth that raw "GB/s" numbers don't tell us.
| Doctor_MG said: A base XBO will certainly not be it's maximum. The RAM bandwidth alone is almost double what the base Xbox One had available, and I find it highly doubtful that Nintendo blocks off 3GB for the OS like MS did for the Xbox One. The Switch 2, if indeed using an Orin processor, will be similarly as capable to the base Xbox One as the original Switch is to the 360, maybe slightly worse. Before you call me crazy on this, I'd like to remind everyone that, by the time the Switch 2 releases, a similar amount of time would have passed. Xbox 360 (2005) ------> Switch (2017) = almost 12 years. Xbox One (2013) ------> Switch 2 (2024) = almost 11 years. And, lets be honest, the Xbox One was underpowered from the start. |
Games like Doom are pushing the Switch a step up over the Xbox 360. Not at the same level as an Xbox One, but it's definitely a step up over all the 7th gen devices.
I would not be surprised if we start seeing Playstation 4 grade graphics on a next-gen Switch.
Today... We are getting that out of the Steam Deck, in a year or two time even with Nintendo's typical conservative hardware? Could be interesting.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
