so, that 500 man/yera from NVIDIA worked only on low level software/api/os? so, software is the secret sauce.

And seems that nintendo is selling at a high profit, that is good, because they can lower the price a lot. and the accessories are expensive by themselves.
and i wonder, new 3dsxl without a charger is 200$. switch only, without accessories(maybe, keeping only joy-con), could be sold by less than that. and only get cheaper by the time.

That should be awesome news for everyone thats spending $300 for one now. 18 months from now they get to see a better version of what they have right now.... even worse probably chaper too.

Graphics cards sell just fine in such a market.

Phones too.

Cars consistently sell with even less improvements year to year.

Personally I will buy every SKU Nintendo produces, and I will not feel bad about it.

While I agree old tech can end up costing you a little more, you still have to account that the Wii U was the follow up to the hugely successful Wii.  Nintendo was on top of the market at that point and should have easily been able to convince manufacturers that their next console would be just as big of a hit, and therefore could take less of a profit on their parts to help lower the price and push sales even further.  Even if the tech was outdated, if the Wii U had launched for $250 and been just as big of a hit as the Wii, the parts would be mass produced to keep up with demand.

And I guess we'll have to wait til Nintendo's financials are released to see if the rumor is true.

wtf?

They should have ditched the A57 cores and just kept only the A53 cores, save on die-space and power... Which would hopefully be better spent on the GPU anyway.

They should have wen't with a Pascal based design which could have provided 50% better performance for the same amount of power. (If not more.)

I think the only way we will see an early price cut is if the Switch sales start to falter.
It's not entirely impossible for that to happen, the Wii U and 3DS faltered shortly after their initial crazy releases.

Nintendo is a company that likes money first, so if they can get away with a higher price, you bet they will have that higher price.

Provided Nintendo doesn't cut back on the battery of course to further decrease costs. It happens all time in the mobile world. ;)

Comparing flops against different architectures is inaccurate anyway.
Maxwell is far more efficient than Graphics Core Next 1.0, so can pretty much do more work "per flop".

But for future reference... Shaders * Instructions per clock * clock rate is the formula to calculate flops.

For pretty much every AMD and nVidia GPU it's 2* instructions per clock. Tegra Maxwell and Pascal have 256 shaders.

Thus 256 * 2 * 768 or 307.2mhz. (Docked and portable respectively, Digital Foundry's numbers.)
Ergo 393Gflop and 157Gflop respectively.

Things get tricky if you start dabbling with half precision, quarter precision, double precision etc'.

In older GPU architectures, things like half precision performance had the same performance as single precision.. But starting with Maxwell and Vega, AMD and nVidia will now combine two FP16 operations and execute it as an FP32 operation, aka. Packed math, which doubles the theoretical FP16 performance over FP32. (But due to real-world inefficiencies, it's not a double of performance in real world scenario's. )

No. It's not way off. There is more to rendering a game than just flops you know.

No. Maxwell has double-rate FP16. So it's not ever going to have 1 Teraflop of performance.
It will have 786 and 314Gflop FP16 respectively.

Just remember that FP16 cannot be used for everything either, because of it's reduced precision there is a quality penalty in rendering some elements.

Stock tegra chip runs the Game of the Year, really shows that both other parties in the console race sort of have the wrong idea about what to strive for to excite gamers and the gaming industry. Outside of digital foundry there are not a whole pile of people go do a pixel count on a per frame basis in games, most would rather a game which is amazing from a gameplay point of view than an amazing amount of pixels on screen.

I'm not saying that graphical fidelity isn't a great thing to have too, just that it doesn't matter how Pro or how Scorpio the other consoles get, they still wont play Breath of the Wild.

I think it's a good thing. A custom one would no doubt be more powerful, but it being stock means it'll be easier to replace the chip with a stock X2 in some time, when it becomes cheaper, giving us a slightly better performance (probably XO -> XOS level) and much better battery life.

That game was built for a semi-custom chip that in the Wii U first remember. It's a port to the Switch from the Wii U, not a game that was built and takes advantage of all the Switch's hardware nuances.

That is one good advantage.

A Pascal based Tegra should be able to be a drop-in replacement almost, hardware wise Pascal was an evolutionary improvement over Maxwell, so it shouldn't utterly destroy compatability.

Don't be surprised if you see 50% or more in efficiency gains.

This is why Nintendo needs their own system. So they can put all their knowledge and innovation into the hardware to create unique experiences.

I was talking about the stock clocked chip, and yes FP16 is not optimal for everything.
I feel that with this SoC we will see greater performance from their games after the 1 - 2 year mark.