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| bonzobanana said: You seem to be focusing on what the chip can potentially do rather than what the battery system can provide for 2 hours. Yes we can all understand the potential for the chip to be more powerful but the reality is for portable use it has to be be powered by a battery. 0.8 Teraflops is surely all it is going to be capable of with a 10Nm/8Nm fabricated chipset. I'm surprised that video had docked performance so low but I guess that means they can have it cooler running, more reliable and cheaper power components. My original guess was between 600 and 800 Gflops in portable mode so my guess for this was at the higher end where as for docked mode by guess was 2-2.4 Teraflops and this is at the lower end. Ultimately my guess was based on how the original Switch was downclocked compared to the underlying chipset in the Nvidia Shield. There is nothing new here in how Nintendo downclocks hardware and chooses the cheapest manufacturing options. 800 Gflops is still a huge upgrade on the original Switch which was more like 120-170 Gflops in portable mode. That is definitely a generational leap and with DLSS on top we are looking at that pixel count boost that Nvidia has claimed of 10x. Who would even want a portable system that lets say can only be powered for an hour before recharging which is what higher gflops figures would have meant. Surely as a practical gaming piece of hardware we want at least 2 hours which over time will shrink a bit anyway. Lets not forget higher current drain shorten's battery life too. A laptop with a 30W current draw will have a much shorter lifespan for the battery unit in general than a Celeron laptop that only draws 12W max. This could be part of Nintendo's plans to restrict current for reliability and lithium battery lifespan benefits. My ryzen laptop needs a replacement battery but my Celeron laptop gives me up to 18hrs runtime and despite being much older the battery pack is still in perfect health with pretty much full capacity because the chipset only sips energy from the battery pack. I can use that Celeron laptop all day without issue. The Ryzen laptop at best was under 2 hours for gaming and went under 1 hour before the battery pack finally failed. The Ryzen laptop has a GPU of about 1.6 Teraflops (3500U), the Celeron laptop about 120 Gflops (Celeron N4120). The Ryzen laptop sounds like a jumbo jet taking off when gaming, the Celeron doesn't even have a fan just a heatsink. There are great benefits to being lower powered as well as disadvantages. Nintendo's sweetspot in performance vs battery life maybe a better choice overall than just focusing on performance for a short period of time. Yes of course they could have had more performance or more battery runtime if they had coughed up for a 5Nm fabrication process but this is Nintendo and they went as cheap as possible. |
What hard evidence do you have that .8 Tflops (260Mhz) is "all it is going to be capable of with a 10Nm/8Nm fabricated chipset."? That is a very specific number to go off of based on the very rough heuristic you're suggesting here.
Process node matters in the chip efficiency, but it isn't the only thing that matters. Actual chip architecture matters too, and we don't have anything to compare this chip to. There is no "Nvidia Shield TV" for the Switch 2. It is a semi-custom chip where as the Switch's chip was the same exact chip with a few very minor modifications as what existed in the Shield.
Comparing to the power scaling of Ryzen and Celeron laptops that are using x86 chipsets that target a higher TDP from the start isn't a proper comparison as well.
If the Switch 2 handheld's target max GPU clock is 561Mhz (which seems likely) then it isn't in dispute. Handheld mode is 1.71 Tflops in its highest power state, which would correspond with the 2 hour battery life.
Where does the 561Mhz come from? The same people that leaked everything else.
