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HoloDust on 03 July 2026
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Garrus said:
HoloDust said:

Except Nintendo going with ARM+nVidia has nothing to do with how "modern" hardware is.

Choice of vendor comes down to realities of product requirements they are making and offerings/pricing from hardware manufacturers at that point. For Nintendo it made sense to go with that combo, since they needed reasonable low power solution for Switch (which was at the time nVidia Tegra X1, trying to make it in phone/tablet market). Sony/MS built 8th gen around most reasonable combo for their needs (home consoles), which was AMD for their integration of x86 CPU with good GPUs at low prices, they carried on with that in 9th gen, and will be going on with that in 10th gen as well, both for power, backward compatibility, and pricing, with latest hardware from AMD.

I guess my point is, that is one reason Xbox failed and Nintendo succeeded. Modern hardware. Imagine if the Xbox was NVidia + ARM + SDcard/SSD. I think it would have succeeded and not failed, despite the lack of games. The RTX 3070 with 16GB of VRAM would have been an amazing console in 2020. People would have stopped buying discs in 2020, and had other physical options. The CPU portion would basically be free, die size wise, and the power use would be so low it would also save money.

3070 level GPU in console in 2020 would cost arm and a leg. Not only it was the latest nVidia's offering, but nVidia is known for always being quite a bit more costly option. GPU in XSX is around that level (in raster), and it was latest tech from AMD. PS5 draws about the same wattage as 3070, while actually having x86 CPU, which is, due to backward compatibility, developer tools and actual performance, much better option than going with ARM.

As I said, it has nothing to do with how "modern" hardware is - neither Switch's success nor XBOX failing have anything to do with what's inside the box, but rather what those platforms offered.