Nvidia employee acknowledges Tegra 239 SoC rumored to be powering Switch 2

[DonFerrari]

Soundwave said:

Pemalite said:

It's a good price-sensitive panel, but it's not the best OLED has to offer... Far from it.
Nintendo can take things a step further than what you have seen on the Samsung OLED panel in the Switch.

10-bit, HDR would be a massive upgrade. 120hz perhaps? Or maybe variable refresh rate technology?

But we need to keep in mind that consoles aren't high-end devices that use high-end parts, so I would hope the next console has at-least a 900P panel.

Soundwave said:

Regarding CD-drives I mean by the mid-90s basically every PC being shipped had this kind of a CD drive, I wonder if most people even knew what company made their CD-drive, a lot of PCs just shipped with a "generic" brand less CD-ROM drive. 

The thing is, it may be a no-named branded CD Rom drive, but a lot of the internal components that make up the drives are made by different manufacturers... Or different brands may use identical components.

I.E. OSI Optoelectronics might produce the Photodiode optical sensor in a Sony -and- Pioneer optical drive.

Which is why brand loyalty in electronics tends to be silly... Often components are sourced from the same manufacturers.

Absolutely.

There are plenty of choices available.

But in general, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft need to weight the cons/benefits of every design on offer by manufacturers and opt for the one with the greatest benefit to their end console design that fits a price budget. And that is the key thing... Price.

It's why IBM was chosen as the defacto CPU core in the 7th gen, but fell behind in the 8th and 9th gen as more cost efficient and performant CPU designs became readily available in a consoles limited budget.

In saying that... Carts do have some massive technical advantages over optical drives... I.E. SSD type access latencies which means streaming and random reads are a thing, reducing the need for data to be pre-loaded into RAM. - I.E. Just send the texture from cart to the 4kb texture cache and bypass the RDRAM entirely.

I think we'd be surprised how chaotic and (not sure if this is the right word) unprofessional Nintendo was with hardware design in the 80s/90s. 

It was very much a fly by the seat enterprise and Yamauchi was often all over the place and Nintendo's own internal teams were at each other's throats. 

There was a lot of crazy things going on. We'd like to think there was a lot of logic to decision making, but in studying Nintendo (and Sega too) of the 80s/90s you start to realize there was a lot of egos and frankly pig-headed management decisions that were all over the place. 

For starters, how did Nintendo ever even sign the initial contract with Sony that gave them licensing fees for CD based games on a SNES CD-ROM was insane. Did no one bother to read the document before they signed it? Did they properly vet it? I don't think their legal department at the time (they signed this deal in 1988) really was up to snuff. Someone had to have been fired over that gong show. By the early 90s they realized they had signed a terrible deal and had to weasel out of it, my question is why would you even allow to be put in that bad of a spot in the first place. 

You would think that might be a one off thing but Nintendo did the exact same thing with the Game Boy, they had an agreement with Citizen to make the screen and they then reneged on the deal after Citizen had been told the deal was theirs and went with Sharp instead, spurring Citizen to go work with Sega on the Game Gear. 

The SNES I believe had its CPU scaled back almost at the very last minute on Yamauchi's orders. The GBA's display was changed very late in development for a terrible version of the screen too. 

The decision to go cart-only with the N64 I'm sure was filled with a lot of stupid politics that didn't make sense. There's a lot of egos at Nintendo and Yamauchi encouraged the dev teams to basically be hostile to each other too in vying for his love/attention. 

We kinda forget, Nintendo wasn't really always a game company, they were a random small Japanese company that got thrust into making video games and home video games in particular due to the unexpected success of the Famicom and really was making up the rules as they went along in many instances. 

Cartridges had some advantages yes, although Nintendo also demonstrated that Super Mario 64 was able to run on the 64DD with fairly minimal load times ... the 64DD had disc read speeds about roughly in line with a 4x-8x CD-ROM drive. The timing was kind of bad too, CD-ROM prices plummeted in 1996 and especially 1997 and 4x CD drives were all over the place by 1997, if that had happened maybe even a year earlier maybe it would have been more obvious to Nintendo. Because CD-ROM was basically became the epitome of cheap tech, ironically the 64DD was almost certainly more expensive hardware than what a 4x CD drive would've cost by the end of '97. We saw also, Sony had no problem basically cutting the price of the Playstation to match any price cuts Nintendo did because the price of the CD drive became negligible as 1997, 1998 wore on. Every time Nintendo tried to cut the price of the N64 to give them more market traction, Sony would just respond by cutting the Playstation's price too. 

I don't think Nintendo decision had to do with the price of the drive or it not being mainstream. It likely had more to do with the fumble of Sega-CD, CD-i and a plethora of other CD based consoles that came before N64 that they likely used to validate their decision and them became surprised that PS1 found success.