Predict the price for Switch 2

[Pemalite]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

edit: Considering that the GPU part is basically half a 3050 (which is the same chip as the larger 3050Ti and 200mm²), but with enhanced IO, I'd say the GPU and IO part will be around 90-110mm². If we consider the Cortex A78AE cores to be similar in size to the Alder Lake e-cores, we'll get to ~120-140mm².

It really depends how dense they can make those core clusters. Shared cache and the amount of cache makes all the difference as cache doesn't really scale downwards to smaller fabrication processes very well.

I/O is a hard thing to quantify, the higher your DRAM speed and layout, the more complex it is to build IO, so a GPU tends to have fairly large amounts of I/O due to that fact.

I think 150mm2 is a fine ballpark figure of what is reasonable expected from a handheld mobile chip.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

An interesting part to the CPUs is the AE at the end of the description. ARM uses this normally for cores that support multithreading - but the Cortex A78 doesn't. So either NVidia has added multithreading to those cores or it stands for something else entirely in NVidia's case. If they indeed are capable of multithreading then a 6-core CPU part could suffice for Nintendo.

In nVidia's case it's actually a standard Cortex A78, but the AE stands for "Automotive Enhanced".

That means the chip has been tested to operate mission critical components like speed clusters on a cars dash.

Hyperthreading does increase die-size and energy consumption, so it's usually reserved for devices that are less energy sensitive.

6 cores would absolutely be fine, 8 would be preferable, we need to remember that 1-2 CPU cores will be used for the OS/Background tasks leaving less for actual games.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

As for the performance, the full fat Orin 64GB has a raw performance pretty similar to that of the PS4 Pro. So I expect the Orin NX 16 GB to be closer to the PS4 in raw performance, (it's about Radeon HD 7790 level) but with all the modernisations since then, Switch 2 would be noticeably more performant than the last-gen console.

Considering a Geforce 1050Ti can beat a Radeon R9 380, where the R9 380 is already twice as fast as the Playstation 4's Radeon 7850-level GPU... Orin with 1024 Cuda cores and 100GB/s of bandwidth would decimate the Playstation 4... And even the Playstation 4 Pro.

As Orin not only has more CUDA cores than a 1050Ti Pascal, but it's more efficient -and- can clock higher.

Raw numbers isn't what we should ever base hardware performance on, because there has been massive strides in efficiency in the last decade.