| bonzobanana said: I don't think TSMC is necessarily that expensive for their older processes. My android tablet a Doogee T30 Pro was £60 from Amazon Warehouse/Resale and yes it was a return but it was £60, perhaps half the price it was selling for at the time brand new and has a Mediatek Helio G99 chipset that was fabricated by TSMC on a 6Nm process. The model was released in 2023 and also has a great IPS 1600 x 2560 screen, 20MP camera, 8GB of memory, 256GB of storage. It is probably around the same CPU performance as Switch 2 but of course graphically I think its more like 280 Gflops from memory so more like original Switch than Switch 2. I feel like 5Nm should be doable if its 18 months away. It can actually emulate some Switch 1 games at full speed. There are various videos on youtube showing this. Any decent emulators written for ARM work very well on it. I think the next Xbox will be a PC designed to be also compatible with older Xbox console titles. It will likely be a console that can only use Microsoft's own PC store and Xbox store. It will be Microsoft's first step away from consoles, blurring the lines somewhat. It won't be great value but it will be great performance. This is what most analysts seem to be expecting. |
TSMC is definitely more expensive than Samsung.
Samsung can't compete with TSMC on lithography, so they compete on price.
Mediatek Helio G99 is built on TSMC 6nm process, which is based on the 7nm process... But it's a mid-range SoC with a small die-size, so they are able to get a ton of functional chips per wafer, which is how they can justify it.
Plus... Mediatek have "bulk contracts" for a plethora of different chips at different lithographies, so they are able to negotiate a bulk contracted price for multiple different chips at different sizes and complexities to drive down price... Something Nintendo can't do with their single chip.
The Tegra chips also tend to be a bit larger than their contemporaries due to the investment in the graphics side of the equation.
Also, Gflops is a useless metric that doesn't tell us comparative performance... Especially as the Helio uses a tiled based graphics chip anyway.
| bonzobanana said: Like you I've been impressed with Switch 2 battery life all things considered but it is a fixed platform with low CPU resources and games like Cyperpunk in performance mode are only generating a 640x360p image which is AI upscaled to 720p. This isn't something the PS4 or Xbox One series could do they had to natively render at far higher resolutions. So its 19.74Wh battery is doing well to power the console for a minimum of 2 hours so realistically the T239 can only be getting maybe 6-7W tops for the most demanding games allowing for the screen power and other chips. 10Nm plus 19.74Wh equalling 2 hours is very impressive but clearly we don't know the real clocks of the chips. I suspect the Switch 2 GPU is under 1 Teraflop in portable mode. Geekerwan analysed the Switch 2 and said 1.3 Teraflops but that is a peak figure only. Switch 1 could go above 200 Gflops in portable mode but was somewhere between 30-140 Gflops for portable gaming with likely short lived peaks above that in reality. This is probably true of most handhelds and laptops too to be honest. They don't maintain their maximum performance on battery. The benefits of a fixed platform are you can optimise games for reduced battery consumption. Something like the Steamdeck has 4.5x the CPU performance of Switch 2. That CPU performance has a battery runtime cost. Trimming game engines to work with lower CPU resources also maximises battery runtime. It does feel to me Nvidia did focus on power consumption more than AMD because for many years they were on an inferior fabrication process of Samsung 8Nm (10Nm) so maybe they needed to be for their laptop chipsets. Admittedly I have a Nivida RTX 2050 laptop and I don't even bother with the Nvidia when using it off battery I just keep to the AMD GPU but then the AMD APU is on a 7Nm fabrication process and the RTX 2050 is on 10Nm like the Switch 2. I can get about 1 hour just over with the Nvidia chipset at full power but 2-3 hours on the AMD GPU which admittedly is about a third of the power of the Nvidia GPU. 1.5 Teraflops vs 5-10 Teraflops (fp32/fp16). |
Gflops and Teraflops is bullshit. Just going to leave it at that... It doesn't tell us integer throughput, says nothing of geometry/pixel/texel fillrates, doesn't account for Ray Tracing capabilities or A.I. inference performance, alone it's a useless metric.
The power consumption of the chip in the Switch 2 is actually designed to run at higher power levels comparable to chips like we are seeing in PC handhelds, chips have a performance/power consumption curve and Nintendo with the aid of nVidia adjusted it to fit the handheld form factor for sustained use. - And that's the key... Sustained use, not boosted or temporary clocks that drop once thermals reach a threshold.
Where they can make-up performance due to lower clockrates and voltage curves is with low-level API's, which has always been the strength of consoles relative to the PC.
If you "limit" PC handheld TDP's you can curb power consumption and boost efficiency substantially to the point of being comparable to the Switch 2, but because integrated AMD graphics are a generation behind desktop, you don't have techniques like A.I upscaling to bridge the gap, so image quality tends to suffer as a result.
That will be resolved once AMD eventually leaves behind RDNA 2/3 integrated graphics on it's APU's and embraces UDNA/RDNA4/RDNA5 graphics eventually... But backporting FSR4 has shown some interesting results on Steamdeck.
| bonzobanana said: I suspect the next Switch 2 console with OLED screen will be a huge upgrade and they will have the power resources to overdrive the display panel properly. It will make no difference at all to those that only play docked but as a portable system it will be on another level of quality. However I noticed in Japan some of the criticism for the Switch 2 is its just too big and wonder if Nintendo will take this onboard somehow. |
OLED is a must... If I need to pick and chose a handheld to take with me, I always reach for my Switch 1 OLED, it just looks and runs better thanks to that OLED panel.
The Switch 2's poor performing LCD doesn't do it any favors, especially in games with lots of darkness or really massive contrast differences.
And the fact Nintendo didn't add VRR to the Switch 2 via HDMI output was a silly decision to make... Which could be resolved with a revision.
| zorg1000 said: I know I’m a few days late to the discussion about subsidizing hardware but one thing that I noticed getting overlooked is how important the gaming sector is to each of the hardware companies. |
It also highlights a level of risk for all three companies in the event of a console failing... For Nintendo it's a massive impact, which is why they don't subsidize hardware, so even if they had poor sales, they are still making money and reduces risk so they can justify a successor.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
