That's talking about making games easier to port from handheld to home console and vice versa. However, at the end of the day you are still making two distinct builds have to test for two distinct platforms. This is a solid idea. It makes it a far easier decision for Developers to support both the NX Home and NX Handheld instead of one or the other. It will lead to more games on both platforms.

However, let's be clear, this is far and away from what others have been saying. This is describing two distinct platforms. Not one platform in two form factors. Sure it'll be easier than say it is to make a Wii game run on the 3DS, or a PS3 game run on the Vita, but it's still not as easy as "Make one game that plays on two different form factors of the same console". You still have to make device-specific optimizations. You still need to test on every platform. Let's use an example Nintendo discusses. iOS - not every piece of software available for the iPhone is available for the iPad and vice versa. There are reasons for that. Even though they share very similar operating systems, and the same development API, they are two distinct platforms. You need to modify your iPhone app to work properly on the iPad. You don't just make an iPhone app and it "just work" on the iPad. Not even close. Even if you're just making an iPhone app. If you want your app to work well on the iPhone 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, and 6S you need to optimize the app for each device and test it on the 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, and 6S. You need to have all of those devices to deploy your app to. You can't just make an app for the iPhone 5 and assume it will work just as well on the 4 and 6.

The same will go for the next Nintendo platform. Even if the development environment is more unified, even if the different devices share similar architecture, they will be treated as two separate devices, have separate software, and developers will not be forced to develop for both simultaneously.

Thank you for providing further concrete evidence to support what I've been saying all along. I appreciate it.

If the portable is near/equal to the Wii U, I think will be fine for Nintendo if the console is basically just the same games in 1080P. If some devs want to go beyond that and add other effects, that would be their perrogative. 

Nintendo's consoles have dug their own grave, only the Wii has been truly a success in the past 15-20 years and that was again largely off the back of cheap casual games not big epic titles. Nintendo can't afford to keep their best franchises away from where 80% of their existing audience is, right now they're selling games like Splatoon and Mario Maker to a niche 10 million group of people that like playing Nintendo games on their TV, and that's an insanely stupid business model which they probably are very keen to change. 

I don't think Nintendo really has any huge interest in making today's "epic" games anyway, I don't think they're looking at Uncharted and saying "wow, we should be making games like that". 3D Zelda is really their only hugely epic franchise from a budget/scale POV and that looks great on existing Wii U tech as is. 

And no, I was never talking about two completely distinct architectures. 

It's all in the math and pixel count dude. 1080p is 1920X1080= 2,073,600 pixels, 480p is 640X480=307,200, 1080p is 6.75X more demanding to render than 480p.

That's with the same level of effects, physics, everything being the same comparing one resolution to another. If the NX console had the same level of hardware as PS4 then the NX handheld could run the exact same level of visuals and every other feature just at native 480p if it was packing 1/6.75 of the hardware of the console.

When I say Carrizo cut down, it's just an easier way of saying an APU that uses a smaller amount of Excavator CPU cores and GPU tech than what Carrizo has, clocked low enough to fit within X amount of a wattage budget. The CPU core type could be Puma or Puma+, that would still outstrip Jaguar since Puma is a new architecture, with better performance per watt.

As for the HBM comment, HBM can be used in whatever quantities Nintendo needs, dependent on cost they have outlined or factory output. From a power consumption perspective 1 watt can allow for 35GB/s of bandwidth, it's a flexible technology that would work for any platform holder's needs in their next platform, very efficient indeed, about 3X better than GDDR5 is currently.

Personally I think NX has a great chance of doing well, particularly if it is designed to put Nintendo's games at the forefront and break down any barriers between the handheld and console audiences that Nintendo covers.

If Nintendo focused on making a platform that caters to the 3rd party development community it could very well be Nintendo's chance to gain business back for not only the console market, but also the handheld. Even 3DS lacks the major releases like Witcher 3, Batman games, etc, if NX console can run good versions of those games and a handheld version can play those games too, even at 480p with lower graphical details it could mean big business for both Nintendo and their 3rd party partners.

As far as your last comment goes, you're not looking at things in the right way.

From a technical perspective it's the added pixels that cause the major demand on hardware, sure extra gameplay features add to that demand, but they're not the biggest performance hog on hardware, rendering extra pixels is.

I honestly don't think Nintendo will be okay with low-level physics, AI, etc on a Console. Those things won't change with resolution.

So you think they should just give up? The point of a Console according to them, is to offer an experience that can only be experience on their console. They screwed up on Wii U, they've screwed up some of their consoles; therefore they should just give up? I doubt they'll give up trying to " innovate"

I'm not saying they should make an Uncharted; however a difference in power does open up new possibilities, as we've seen with Wii U. I doubt they'd want to break away from that.

Sorry, but I don't see this describing two distinct platforms.

Of Course that 100% of same software will not work on home console and handheld, but I expect 80%.

All this means that developing games for NX home console and handheld console will be much easier and faster than developing games for instance for Xbox 360 and PS3 or 3DS and Vita, or even PS4 and XboxOne.

They can still make the occassional wacky/"innovative" game that can only function with a console controller. A lot of people may have thought the Wii was giving up too, Nintendo abandoning competing with Sony/MS to recycle the GameCube for a motion controller. 

They can't continue on the way they are now. Approximately 300 GFLOPS is plenty for physics and AI even on a portable platform particularily for the games Nintendo makes. 

The fact is their last remaining strong hold, the portable market is also under attack. They can't afford to have their software library split between two platforms any longer, this is like an army that's suffering heavy losses trying to hold two fronts. 

Beyond that it's not "giving up" to acknowledge you can't support two high-end platforms at once. That's just accepting reality. Supporting the Wii/DS is one thing when development costs of those platforms was low, but they can't even hack it with a PS3-level console and a PS2-level handheld today. This is supposed to magically get better with a PS4-level console and a Vita++ level handheld? 

Yeah no. Nintendo also says a lot of things, like how they'll never make smartphone games. Sony wouldn't be able to support two platforms like that at once either, the PS4 is like almost 3 years old and it feels like just now is Sony finally "warming up" with their development teams. There's no chance Nintendo could juggle that while also having to make several high end handheld games per year on top of that. 

And yes, the one thing people don't talk about right now is that quite frankly it's terrible business to have your highest end/most expensive games only available to 20% of your fanbase. 80% of Nintendo hardware buyers this gen won't be playing Splatoon, Mario 3D World, Legend of Zelda U, Mario Maker, or Mario Kart 8. That just isn't smart business any way you spin it and it has to change. 

Is the Carizzo really all that special? I think the chip Nintendo would want AMD to start with is not the Carizzo, but the Wii U chip itself. That's a 40nm part, I'm sure today they can probably look at that chip and improve its efficiency even further, then you make a new chip based on that design. Replace the IBM CPU, get it on a 14nm process, remove the embedded RAM on the GPU for likely more power efficient HBM2. 

The Wii U chip gets about 11 GFLOPS/watt (if we believe the 350 GFLOP number that's used for it) at 40nm, if it was somehow possible to shrink that to 14nm, that would probably be in the range of 22-23 GFLOPS/watt which is fairly comparable to a Carizzo, no? Considering it's a 4-5 year old chip, that's not bad, I'm sure they could today improve it's power efficiency even more without just die shrinks too. 

As for pixels, I think for the portable maybe 960x540 resolution for really demanding 3D games, which would correspond 1:4 to 1920x1080 for the console. For lower end games, I think even the portable could just run things like Kirby's Rainbow Curse, Yoshi's Wooly World, Star Fox Zero, at 1280x720 though. 

1 watt per 35GB of bandwidth sounds ok, but wouldn't that be too power hungry for a portable? The design of the handheld is going to have to be the trick here I think, because the console is relatively easy to figure out because you can just plug it into the wall. 

*If* they can get PS4 level engines (with some effects stripped down) to run on a portable at a reduced resolution, yes I agree, they would probably get a shit-ton of Japanese third party support at least, and probably an OK amount of Western support too. I wonder if that's doable though. 

80% in common would be less in common than a PS4 game has with its X1 counterpart. And again, when developing for those platforms they are treated as two separarate entities, because they are. You know not of what you speak. There is no reason to expect it will be easier to develop a game for both NX home and NX handheld than it will be to develop a game for PS4 and X1.

For example do you know much extra work it takes to turn an iPhone game into an iPad game? Do you think that's trivial or complex?

Remember I just say Carrizo because it represents AMD's latest GCN core, along with using the Excavator line of CPU, all in the same SOC package, I think Beema and Mullins use different varients of Puma, one's Puma and the other Puma+, not sure about the level of GCN core in either of those.

AMD doesn't make IBM PowerPC CPU technology, it's all their own tech that they can provide Nintendo with, not IBM stuff, a single SOC makes way more sense than separate parts for a console, just because it's much cheaper and faster for manufacturing.

Whether AMD uses Puma, Puma+ or Excavator CPU technology it's all more capable than both Wii U's PowerPC and AMD's own Jaguar CPU tech.

The GPU in Wii U is an older architecture than the 7000 series tech in PS4 and XB1, the later stuff is more efficient on even the 28nm node it's built on.

AMD's current GCN core offers up 23.4GFlops per watt, so more than 2X more efficient than the GPU tech in Wii U, power consumption tests don't really state specifically how much energy the GPU alone uses, but the Carrizo System on Chip is packing a Quad Core Excavator CPU, at 2.1GHz, along with a 819GFlop GPU, as I said building a SOC with an 8 Core Excavator CPU and a 1638GFlop GPU would only require 70 watts for the SOC.

AMD's own tech is readily available, if Nintendo wrote an emulator they could emulate Wii U and 3DS.

As for the whole resolution on handheld thing, any higher resolution really isn't needed, it just adds cost and power demands to the system, for a handheld the more efficient it is the better. Going higher than 480p on a tiny handheld screen, when you can keep all of the gameplay features, most of the visual punch, enough of everything overall to make a good approximation of what the home console games look like is all you need to do.

This handheld spec I'm suggest can handle PS4 level visuals, with some slight concessions at 480p, things you won't even notice will be cut from the handheld version of games. That spec can definitely handle any games the Wii U had.

For reference 720p is 1280X720=921,600, as I said before 640X480=307,200, that's exactly 1/3rd of the pixels of 720p.

Our 819GFlop Carrizo APU runs on 35 watts, at 5 watts it's outputting 117GFlops (not counting the Excavator CPU performance or even talking about the better IPC gains over PowerPC), if Wii U has a 350GFlop GPU, then 1/3rd of it's performance is 116.6666666666667GFlops, the cutdown Carrizo is slightly more capable in the GPU department, plus the SOC would be HSA, allow way better multicore performance between the CPU and GPU.

Wii U level games would be no problem running everything the same, except for the resolution, 3DS games would be dominated by this system.

Re: Bandwidth HBM could be running slower, 35GB/s is at 1 watt, 25GB/s would only be 0.71watts, 1watt isn't too power hungry though, I mean the SOC would only be 5 watts, so memory and SOC would be 6 watts together. That's a 117GFlop GPU and probably 2 Excavator CPUs clocked at 1.2Ghz, in a handheld, very good performance IMO.

Bare in mind AMD Zen or the K12 CPU could be on the cards for Nintendo, that's a 14nm part, an even newer GCN part could be available too them and a newer HBM chipset, all with better performance.

Nintendo needs to think about what the development community outside of Nintendo wants, considering Nintendo are a member of the Khronos foundation I would think some version of Vulkan could very well be used in NX and perhaps they'll get help with their dev tools from AMD as a part of any collaboration on developing NX's processing tech.

The main area I think this will help Nintendo is in their own software sales, they'll push more 3DS and Wii U games if NX can run everything, which I don't see as unlikely, it would just require Nintendo to build an emulator for those games to run on NX. Personally I think there's no reason why Nintendo can't have both the handheld and console ready to go on the same day.

As I've shown AMD's tech is scalable, cutdown parts can definitely be made to fulfill the handheld's requirements, reducing power consumption, it all fits with what's required for a unified platform, hell even the whole API issue can easily be solved by Nintendo's involvement with Khronos and DeNA (from what I understand) can sort out the issues Nintendo have had with their online.

There's even positive rumors about 3rd party being happy with what they've been told about Nintendo's next platform. This all hinges on AMD providing everything in the processor department and them learning where they've gone wrong in the past.

The only area that I haven't heard a thing about is in Nintendo's own development camp. If Nintendo wants to gain back 3rd party then they need to make western focused games that will appeal to the western 3rd party market, of course any major shift in software focus would remain under wraps until NX gets officially announced, so this is something we probably won't find out about until E3 2016 happens, unless leaks begin to happen at some point this year or before E3 next year.

The hardware and API stuff seems like it could be covered, based on educated guesses and some logic, but it's still all just speculation for now.

The major differences between PS4 and XB1 are API based, one's a version of DirectX/3D and the other's a custom variation of a LibGCM API, similar to OpenGL.

Hardware wise the major difference is in memory type, the CPU and GPU are of the same architecture, but there are also odd additions that one has, which the other doesn't.

CPU and GPU architecture in PS4 and XB1 are identical, quantities of GPU tech are grander in PS4 and there are clock speed difference.

The NX being invisioned by most people basically has the same API running on handheld and console, also the architecture would be identical, with the handheld only packing a smaller amount of tech or different clock speeds for parts to allow it to run on less energy. Developers could build the console version of a game, made to run at 1080p 30FPS, but the rendering pipeline could have options built in it to simply turn off that 1080p option and run the game at 480p, same goes for disabling AA, AF or any major performance hog.

Platform specific optimizations would stretch to reducing settings, in much the same way you'd turn off settings on a PC game because you're rig can't handle the higher resolution or GFX version of a game.

The difference between NX console and handheld is power, not architecture or API based.