| sc94597 said: I never said the X1 was customized for any specific form-factor. In fact, that is my original point. It was designed to be used in many different devices with many different purposes. Also, let's not become the pot calling the kettle black with "you have twisted my statements to try to fit your narrative." You have the tendency of splicing statements out of their original context and replying to them as if they aren't part of a stream of thought. You do this often and to many people. Besides, I didn't "twist your statement" I addressed that you put words into my mouth that I never made, like the idea that hardware was sitting somewhere and then was being used in Switch's. |
You stated Nintendo purchased the Tegra X1 as a "Hand me down". - It's a false statement.
| sc94597 said: Every single design decision requires a labor-force that typically makes six-figures per FTE (in the U.S) to plan, design, and test those decisions. Microarchitecture R&D is separate from the R&D for designing the actual chipsets. There were still FTE's that made decisions about what the specific SOCs look like with the X1, and they cost money to employ. This isn't some binary of "R&D is done when Maxwell [or other micro-architecture] comes out." Tons of decisions are made after that. |
Good thing the USA isn't the leader in chip manufacturing then.
| sc94597 said: And yes, planning the development of a chipset specifically with one platform in mind and its form-factor does require more R&D than just plopping in an already designed general-purpose chip, turning off a few CPU cores, and adjusting clock-rates. Are you seriously arguing otherwise here? |
The Tegra X1 is a standardized commidty part, like an SSD or Ram.
Nintendo purchases it, sets clocks and voltages as per their design specifications via firmware, then gets ANOTHER company to assemble it.
| sc94597 said: If I were to make an analogy, its the difference between making a new video game and making a remaster of a game. In both scenarios you might be using middleware like a game engine (in this analogy that would be the micro-architecture design that has already been done) but the latter (remaster : adjusting a few clock rates) requires a lot less work, FTE, and money than the prior (developing a new game : designing hardware to fit a specific form-factor and purpose over the course of years.) |
No one designs chips strictly for consoles anymore. They are assembly of already pre-designed parts.
The days of Cell are over.
| sc94597 said: The Switch 2 SoC isn't based on the T234 in the same way T210 in the Switch was on T210 in the Shield. I'm not sure where you got that idea. It was developed adjacent to it and the design decisions were made with its form-factor and intended use in mind. Some decisions might have been made for Ampere-based Tegra in general, but not all of these decisions. That's why it doesn't, for example, include specialized edge-compute hardware but has an FDE. Just because they both use the same basic architecture and share some design choices, doesn't mean there isn't different R&D being done for these two chips beyond the micro-architecture and common chipset family R&D. |
Tegra T234 was designed primarily for Nvidia's Jetson AGX Orin for Industrial/HPC applications.
Nintendo took the Switch approach and took an already designed nVidia chip for the Switch 2 and made some clockspeed and voltage changes to fit within it's design goals.
T234 being Ampere and ARM based is a quick time-to-market with low R&D investment as the architectures were already designed and ratified for other markets.
| Conina said: The Steam Deck seems to be set on lowest settings... even the textures, which makes no sense. The Steam Deck has 16 GB RAM and can handle higher textures without any performance decreases. The screenshots of the Switch 2 version are from the trailer, which will of course be the docked mode, not the handheld mode. No wonder that the docked Switch 2 version looks better than PC handheld footage in lowest settings. Footage of the undocked Switch 2 version compared with the PC version with optimized settings on PC handhelds (Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go...) will be much more interesting. |
Keep in mind we are dealing with the strengths/weaknesses that we typically see when comparing AMD against nVidia, just this time in Handhelds.
That is... AMD Radeon's tend to be significantly worse at upscaling, ray tracing and are less efficient overall.
There are going to be instances where the Steamdeck is faster, but other instances where the Switch 2 is faster, more RAM for instances doesn't always guarantee better textures, you need the TMU's and Bandwidth to have the throughput to manage higher textures.
Plus of course we have the wild-card that is developer porting, many instances where a vastly more powerful PC had it's games running worse than the console version. (The Vice versa has happened also, but much less often.)
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