By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Emily Rogers: NX not gonna use X86 architecture, raw power close to XBO

Frogger on 19 May 2016
captain carot said:

Well, AMD has three different gaming chips. There might as well be another customer. But AMD has ARM designs as well, so NX could be from AMD without being x86.

All those reports of Nvidia seem to come from semiaccurate. Or at least from the same source. At the same time sources point at AMD, with AMD definitely having three different designs for gaming.

Only one of them come from semi accurate, and only the semiaccurate one specifies a handheld. One specifies a console, and Emily's just refers to "future hardware," so it can be assumed that Nvidia is doing both.

No reliable source has ever mentioned AMD. All of it is speculation.



Around the Network
captain carot on 19 May 2016

No reliable source (in terms of having hard facts) has mentioned anyone.
The best real fact so far speaking for anything is AMD talking about three chips for gaming. Again, that's no proof of NX going with AMD.
Actually if it's ARM it could be any ARM manufacturer. With Nintendo already being an ARM licensee they could probably even go for Mali.
AMD could do an ARM SoC as well. So again, AMD is talking about three design wins for gaming.

Right now i'd put nothing as a fact.

Just a side note: Some have been talking about Tegra X1 for a handheld. That seems outright stupid.K1 and X1 both were critized for bein g to energy hungry for tablets. X1 is a perfect fit for a settop box. Parker might be interesting but only if it's way more energy efficient (for handheld) or way more powerful (home console).



nomad on 19 May 2016
captain carot said:
No reliable source (in terms of having hard facts) has mentioned anyone.
The best real fact so far speaking for anything is AMD talking about three chips for gaming. Again, that's no proof of NX going with AMD.
Actually if it's ARM it could be any ARM manufacturer. With Nintendo already being an ARM licensee they could probably even go for Mali.
AMD could do an ARM SoC as well. So again, AMD is talking about three design wins for gaming.

Right now i'd put nothing as a fact.

Just a side note: Some have been talking about Tegra X1 for a handheld. That seems outright stupid.K1 and X1 both were critized for bein g to energy hungry for tablets. X1 is a perfect fit for a settop box. Parker might be interesting but only if it's way more energy efficient (for handheld) or way more powerful (home console).

The statement about three designs wins doesn't specifically mention any of them to be for gaming. The three gaming design win part is speculation from the media. She says they have 3 wins that will add to revenue  in the next 3-4yrs. And they have their current console wins that may increase revenue in the second half of the year ("seasonal uplift" because of holidays).

The original source is from the earings call transcipt, here from seeking alpha:

"Unknown Speaker

All right. Thanks. As a follow-up on the Semi-Custom side, didn't some Embedded revenue will likely come in, in the second half, like you guided before, $1 billion of total revenue spread over, I think, three years? How much of the second half growth in Semi-Custom comes from Embedded versus Semi-Custom?

Lisa T. Su - President, CEO & Non-Independent Director

Yeah. So maybe let me give you some explanation on that, Shankar. So the Semi-Custom, just to recap on what we've said about the Semi-Custom designs in the past. We have a total of three design wins that have a lifetime revenue of about, let's call it, $1.5 billion or greater. And that will come across over the next three years to four years.

In addition we have our current game console business as well. So when you look at the aggregate of that, we do expect to start ramping that new business in the second half of the year. But we also expect the seasonal uplift of our traditional game console business. So that's adding to what we expect will be a strong year for Semi-Custom overall."

In fact, it was stated last year in 2014(edit), when they mentioned two design wins, that one was "beyond gaming" (not for gaming). Back then it was $1billion in the next 3-4yrs. Last year, Q3, they mention one additional design win, making it three for a total of $1.5billion ($500m each?). It's possible only one of three is for gaming, but lets assume another is as well. It's fairly certain one if for SONY, that leaves the other for either Nintendo or Microsoft. If XB1.5 is real, then the other win is not for Nintendo.



JustBeingReal on 19 May 2016
Pemalite said:
JustBeingReal said:
I hadn't seen this, but this article was published 10th of Jan 2015:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-in-theory-nintendos-next-gen-hardware-and-the-strategy-behind-it

"Around 18 months ago, during an informal chat with an extremely well-placed individual in the hardware manufacturing business, an interesting nugget of information dropped into the conversation - Nintendo was already accepting pitches from third parties on the hardware make-up of its successor for Wii U. Two names were mentioned: AMD and Imagination Technologies, creators of the PowerVR mobile graphics tech. With the lack of backing sources, that little aside never made it to print, but as Nintendo strives to bounce back from the Wii U sales disappointment, eyes inevitably turn towards future platforms."
So no mention of IBM or NVidia.

For the record if Nintendo went with AMD they could still have an ARM CPU, depends on when K12 is going to be ready, but given that 3rd party asked Sony and Microsoft to go with X86 and Nintendo were making decisions based on 3rd party input it seems highly likely that X86 would be the CPU of choice for a new console.

I hope Nintendo doesn't wait too long after E3 to announce NX and announce exactly what NX is and what tech it's using.


AMD doesn't need K12 to throw out an ARM chip.
They are a full ARM Licensee, they have a license to use all of ARM's IP and freely customize it... If a company apparoches AMD and says "We want this ARM CPU" AMD can take ARM's IP and go straight to the fab and start producing chips almost straight away. (Provided there are no modifications outside of ARM's design.)
A company can also approach AMD and say they want "This and this" in their ARM chip and AMD can add/customize it to any extent they want.

If Nintendo was going to use an ARM chip though, it is likely they will not go for a heavily customized CPU core, in order to reduce time-to-market and R&D costs.

AMD already has a few ARM CPU's on the market such as the Opteron A1100, which used 8x Cortex A57 cores, DDR3 and DDR4 memory controllers, PCI-E 3.0, Sata 3, built on 28nm etc'. - Which is ready for prime time.

We also cannot forget AMD Skybridge which has an ARM+x86 CPU+Graphics Core Next GPU all on the same chip, unfortunately it got cancelled, but the R&D for that was mostly done, which is also the R&D that was leading into K12, Nintendo could be the design win for this.

Basically the rumors of x86 or ARM or Both are all as equally as feasible as each other.

My point wasn't that AMD didn't have an Arm option now, that efficiency just isn't there with current AMD options available in the arm space, K12 would bring that to the table.

Current Opteron chips aren't very efficient, they're 32nm, whereas K12 would be 14nm, so substantial improvements would be made to efficiency and overall performance. Excavator based APUs are more efficient at 28nm, but X86 is the desired platform for 3rd party developers and compared to what's in PS4 and XB1 even Puma was 50% more efficient than Jaguar.

8 Puma cores could hit 2.4GHz and only use 30 watts, Jaguar required 30 watts for 8 cores at 1.6Ghz, an Excavator based APU, with 4 CPU cores clocked at 3.4Ghz, along with 8 GCN Compute Units clocked at 800Mhz only used 35 watts.

X86 is way more likely given that Nintendo were open to 3rd party input at the inception of planning for NX, when you take into consideration the efficiency differences available from the X86 chips compared to what's currently available with Arm options it makes it a no brainer for Nintendo to go with an AMD X86 over an Arm chip. 3rd party have been building their big titles on X86, the major engines use X86 as the basis for their technology.



Frogger on 19 May 2016
nomad said:

The statement about three designs wins doesn't specifically mention any of them to be for gaming. The three gaming design win part is speculation from the media. She says they have 3 wins that will add to revenue  in the next 3-4yrs. And they have their current console wins that may increase revenue in the second half of the year ("seasonal uplift" because of holidays).

The original source is from the earings call transcipt, here from seeking alpha:

"Unknown Speaker

All right. Thanks. As a follow-up on the Semi-Custom side, didn't some Embedded revenue will likely come in, in the second half, like you guided before, $1 billion of total revenue spread over, I think, three years? How much of the second half growth in Semi-Custom comes from Embedded versus Semi-Custom?

Lisa T. Su - President, CEO & Non-Independent Director

Yeah. So maybe let me give you some explanation on that, Shankar. So the Semi-Custom, just to recap on what we've said about the Semi-Custom designs in the past. We have a total of three design wins that have a lifetime revenue of about, let's call it, $1.5 billion or greater. And that will come across over the next three years to four years.

In addition we have our current game console business as well. So when you look at the aggregate of that, we do expect to start ramping that new business in the second half of the year. But we also expect the seasonal uplift of our traditional game console business. So that's adding to what we expect will be a strong year for Semi-Custom overall."

In fact, it was stated last year in 2014(edit), when they mentioned two design wins, that one was "beyond gaming" (not for gaming). Back then it was $1billion in the next 3-4yrs. Last year, Q3, they mention one additional design win, making it three for a total of $1.5billion ($500m each?). It's possible only one of three is for gaming, but lets assume another is as well. It's fairly certain one if for SONY, that leaves the other for either Nintendo or Microsoft. If XB1.5 is real, then the other win is not for Nintendo.

I fucking knew I was remembering that she said one wasn't for gaming. Thanks for clearing this up.



Around the Network
Pemalite on 20 May 2016
JustBeingReal said:

My point wasn't that AMD didn't have an Arm option now, that efficiency just isn't there with current AMD options available in the arm space, K12 would bring that to the table.

K12 isn't expected to drop for another 12+ months, not enough time for a console expected before that.

JustBeingReal said:

Current Opteron chips aren't very efficient, they're 32nm, whereas K12 would be 14nm, so substantial improvements would be made to efficiency and overall performance. Excavator based APUs are more efficient at 28nm, but X86 is the desired platform for 3rd party developers and compared to what's in PS4 and XB1 even Puma was 50% more efficient than Jaguar.

 

Wrong. The Opteron A1100 is built at 28nm. A respin and a shrink to 16nm or 14nm is entirely feasible.
The Opteron A1100 is ARM not x86.

Most game engines already support ARM anyway, like Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine. etc'.
Even companies like Rockstar, Bethesda, Ubisoft, EA have experience developing for ARM.

ARM is probably the only other ISA with as much industry support as x86, Nintendo could also gain ARM developer support that Sony and Microsoft probably couldn't garner.

JustBeingReal said:

8 Puma cores could hit 2.4GHz and only use 30 watts, Jaguar required 30 watts for 8 cores at 1.6Ghz, an Excavator based APU, with 4 CPU cores clocked at 3.4Ghz, along with 8 GCN Compute Units clocked at 800Mhz only used 35 watts.

 

AMD would probably not use Puma. They have Carrizo-L, otherwise known as Puma+
It has a few advantages in regards to power consumption and performance.

JustBeingReal said:

X86 is way more likely given that Nintendo were open to 3rd party input at the inception of planning for NX, when you take into consideration the efficiency differences available from the X86 chips compared to what's currently available with Arm options it makes it a no brainer for Nintendo to go with an AMD X86 over an Arm chip. 3rd party have been building their big titles on X86, the major engines use X86 as the basis for their technology.

 

x86 is likely a given for a non-portable device. ARM is likely what they will use for their mobile effort.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

Soundwave on 20 May 2016
Pemalite said:
JustBeingReal said:

My point wasn't that AMD didn't have an Arm option now, that efficiency just isn't there with current AMD options available in the arm space, K12 would bring that to the table.

K12 isn't expected to drop for another 12+ months, not enough time for a console expected before that.

JustBeingReal said:

Current Opteron chips aren't very efficient, they're 32nm, whereas K12 would be 14nm, so substantial improvements would be made to efficiency and overall performance. Excavator based APUs are more efficient at 28nm, but X86 is the desired platform for 3rd party developers and compared to what's in PS4 and XB1 even Puma was 50% more efficient than Jaguar.

 

Wrong. The Opteron A1100 is built at 28nm. A respin and a shrink to 16nm or 14nm is entirely feasible.
The Opteron A1100 is ARM not x86.

Most game engines already support ARM anyway, like Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine. etc'.
Even companies like Rockstar, Bethesda, Ubisoft, EA have experience developing for ARM.

ARM is probably the only other ISA with as much industry support as x86, Nintendo could also gain ARM developer support that Sony and Microsoft probably couldn't garner.

JustBeingReal said:

8 Puma cores could hit 2.4GHz and only use 30 watts, Jaguar required 30 watts for 8 cores at 1.6Ghz, an Excavator based APU, with 4 CPU cores clocked at 3.4Ghz, along with 8 GCN Compute Units clocked at 800Mhz only used 35 watts.

 

AMD would probably not use Puma. They have Carrizo-L, otherwise known as Puma+
It has a few advantages in regards to power consumption and performance.

JustBeingReal said:

X86 is way more likely given that Nintendo were open to 3rd party input at the inception of planning for NX, when you take into consideration the efficiency differences available from the X86 chips compared to what's currently available with Arm options it makes it a no brainer for Nintendo to go with an AMD X86 over an Arm chip. 3rd party have been building their big titles on X86, the major engines use X86 as the basis for their technology.

 

x86 is likely a given for a non-portable device. ARM is likely what they will use for their mobile effort.

x86 for the console and ARM for the portable never really made a ton of sense for a unified platform, but people were really pushing x86 on NX hard. 

Whatever, lets be honest barring a miracle (x86 or not) Nintendo was never going to have the greatest third party support anyway. 

ARM processors are simply less of a headache when making a unified portable/home platform(s). 



captain carot on 20 May 2016

Nintendo talked about OS and API. Never exactly said that home console and handheld get the same hardware. Nor did they say it wasn't unified hardware.
x86 and ARM is something we see with Android, MS' UWP...
And we could see something similar with Nintendo.
Right now 3DS and Wii U OS look familiar because of the GUI but they aren't. API's are totally different as well. So devs have to do something like a port from scratch.



Soundwave on 20 May 2016

I think people just need to let the x86 go unless we get a reliable source saying it is x86.

Who even cares at this point, realistically I think the dreams of Nintendo competing head on with Sony died with the GameCube. Nintendo is in a different place now and a very different company, they just need NX to be reasonably profitable I guess. 

While personally that stings as a long term Nintendo fan, it's probably true. 

Mobile is going to make a fortune for them, and if handled correctly a Mario/Smash Brothers CGI series of films could also make big bank at the box office.



Fight-the-Streets on 21 May 2016

I'm not a tech guy, so please forgive my question: Why can't the handled be be x86 too?