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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - AMD Hinting that they will get the win for Nintendo's next handheld?

phaedruss on 14 July 2014
Soundwave said:

It doesn't have to match the Wii U in "raw power", it just has to be able to approximate it so Nintendo can port some of their Wii U catalog/engines to it IMO (which you will have to pay for again, don't expect freebies here).

The first thing they can do is slash the resolution of Wii U-style games to 480p or 540p, that reduces the processing power required.

I think perhaps an ARM CPU core + perhaps an AMD GPU, if they can make one power efficient enough, might be the way Nintendo goes.

Perhaps the next Nintendo handheld will also be larger than people think ... it could be more along the lines of the size of an iPad mini IMO, which provides more room for heat dissipation from a hot running chip. 

Yes, a NeoGAF poster who seems to know a lot of the goings on at Nintendo thinks they will definitely go with an ARM CPU.
On that note, I actually think if they go with the iOS model that if it is BC with Wii U any Wii U games you own will be activated on the new system as well.



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fatslob-:O on 14 July 2014
Captain_Tom said:

My god I am glad you aren't making the decisions.  The Atom CPU's are utter garbage, and a screen of that resolution would be laughably bad.

@Bold What exactly are your credentials ?

The Atom CPUs may not be great but Intel processors can get a lower power consumption which is more important for mobile devices and the resolution isn't all that bad seeing as how the screen is small. 



fatslob-:O on 14 July 2014
Soundwave said:

It doesn't have to match the Wii U in "raw power", it just has to be able to approximate it so Nintendo can port some of their Wii U catalog/engines to it IMO (which you will have to pay for again, don't expect freebies here).

The first thing they can do is slash the resolution of Wii U-style games to 480p or 540p, that reduces the processing power required.

I think perhaps an ARM CPU core + perhaps an AMD GPU, if they can make one power efficient enough, might be the way Nintendo goes.

Perhaps the next Nintendo handheld will also be larger than people think ... it could be more along the lines of the size of an iPad mini IMO, which provides more room for heat dissipation from a hot running chip. 

Simply put the speculated specs of the new handheld wouldn't even come close to matching the WII U. It's still too far off. I think Intel would be the better choice and Nintendo portables are known to be ultramobile so having a device of the size of a an iPad mini is mostly out of the question. 



phaedruss on 14 July 2014

What are the dimensions of an iPad Mini compared to the 3DS XL? Also, how expensive will foldable screen technology be in a couple of years?

Ok finally found the dimensions of the system and not the screen

http://www.nintendo.com/3ds/features/compare

These are closed, "93mm high x 156mm wide x 22mm thick (closed)" So double the height for open and you get 7.3 inch high x  6.14 inches wide.  I've measured my 3DS (OG) about 5.5 in x 5.25 in. The iPad mini is 7.8 in x 5.3 in. From here http://support.apple.com/kb/SP661



nomad on 14 July 2014
Captain_Tom said:
nomad said:
phaedruss said:

Sure, but there are still plenty of gains that can be made.

I don't think it's enough for a WiiU BC handheld to be feasible by 2016-17.

LOL it already practically is.  Look the Puma+ cores they are working on.  One of them will be as strong as a Wii U and consume 5w of power.

 

I think you should read of what we were talking about, I was talking about a Vita/3DS like handheld and 5W is too much for these devices. According to Qualcomm 2.5-3W SoC is the upper limit of smart phones and 5W for Tablets.

WiiU' CPU is ancient, it doesn't take much to beat it. A few decently clocked Cortex-A9 would beat it int perf and murder it floating point, but the GPU side will be harder. I'm a believer of the weak 160sp/8rop wiiu gpu theory, still I doubt that 5W Puma+ is "as strong as WiiU" on the gpu side. For example the Tegra K1 is being touted as last-gen-console-like, it needed 11W to get 326GFLOPs. It's true it beats WiiU/XB1/PS3 in term of SP GFLOPs but it is still limited by bandwidth, ROPs, and slighly by texture perf, John Carmack even said take Nvidia's claims with a grain of salt. Also, I'm pretty those 5W Pumas are binned and not a good example to use.



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phaedruss on 14 July 2014
nomad said:
Captain_Tom said:
nomad said:
phaedruss said:

Sure, but there are still plenty of gains that can be made.

I don't think it's enough for a WiiU BC handheld to be feasible by 2016-17.

LOL it already practically is.  Look the Puma+ cores they are working on.  One of them will be as strong as a Wii U and consume 5w of power.

 

I think you should read of what we were talking about, I was talking about a Vita/3DS like handheld and 5W is too much for these devices. According to Qualcomm 2.5-3W SoC is the upper limit of smart phones and 5W for Tablets.

WiiU' CPU is ancient, it doesn't take much to beat it. A few decently clocked Cortex-A9 would beat it int perf and murder it floating point, but the GPU side will be harder. I'm a believer of the weak 160sp/8rop wiiu gpu theory, still I doubt that 5W Puma+ is "as strong as WiiU" on the gpu side. For example the Tegra K1 is being touted as last-gen-console-like, it needed 11W to get 326GFLOPs. It's true it beats WiiU/XB1/PS3 in term of SP GFLOPs but it is still limited by bandwidth, ROPs, and slighly by texture perf, John Carmack even said take Nvidia's claims with a grain of salt. Also, I'm pretty those 5W Pumas are binned and not a good example to use.

Well thankfully the Wii U doesn't have much bandwidth or ROPs :)



Smear-Gel on 14 July 2014
arthurchan35 said:
Smear-Gel said:
What exactly is AMD?


Is this really something you dont know?


People ask questions to find out answers they dont know, yes.



fatslob-:O on 14 July 2014
Smear-Gel said:

People ask questions to find out answers they dont know, yes.

Alright, the long and short of it is that they are Advanced Micro Devices. They manufacture and design x86 CPUs along with the GPUs. 



Smear-Gel on 14 July 2014
fatslob-:O said:
Smear-Gel said:

People ask questions to find out answers they dont know, yes.

Alright, the long and short of it is that they are Advanced Micro Devices. They manufacture and design x86 CPUs along with the GPUs. 


Someone already answered me on page 1, but this was a bit more thorough so thanks anyways



Soundwave on 14 July 2014

If they can get 200-250 GFLOPS of performance in a 3-5 watt package, IMO that's a go for a mini-tablet sized product that can approximate/port the 10-15 "important" Wii U titles that anyone would really care about at 540p or 480p resolution, no?

The XBox 360 is 250 GFLOPS total and that runs most/many games at 720p, so running most/all games at 480-540p (at this level of visual fidelity.

I don't see the handheld really being a 'portable Wii U' as no one really wants that. If it was powerful enough to handle ports, I think the appeal for Nintendo there is that they could port games like DKC: Tropical Freeze that didn't sell perhaps as much as they would have liked on Wii U and get a second chance at selling those games again (hopefully to a larger userbase this time around).