Soundwave said:
Don't think the Tegra X1 was a very efficient chip, it did have high peak performance but it wasn't tweaked well to utilize it, the 20nm process in particular was poor. Those were early days for those kinds of chips too, Nvidia had done the K1 which also had overheating issues and X1. The more bespoke Tegra T239 which Nvidia made with Nintendo I'm sure is more tuned to specific performance Nintendo wanted, you can already really see this as it can handle PS5-tier games much more easily than the Switch 1 (Tegra X1) could handle PS4 games it looks like. Nvidia is a far, far bigger company these days too so they likely just have flat out better engineers than the era of 2015 or so. |
X1 performs just fine, as overclocked Switches out in the wild show.
Only other realistic solution was to go to Qualcomm and get Snapdragon 820 with Adreno 530 (which performs about the same as X1), since there's very little chance Apple would give them their SoC for reasonable price. So, they went with what's available, at best price.
Yeah, probably if they went with some custom design it would perform better, but that would be R&D they had no idea whether or not will make returns - in retrospect everyone's a visionary, but market is fickle and you can't really predict future, so I don't think they were ready for that.
But after success of Switch, I think they had all the necessary info they needed to go to nVidia and ask them for custom chip.
