Nintendo Switch Dev Kit Stats Leaked? Cortex A57, 4GB RAM, 32GB Storage, Multi-Touch.

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Durante said:
For the record, I'm perfectly aware that Nvidia has been using tiled rasterization since Maxwell. It's also not a Tegra-specific feature, I was running the test program on my own GPU when this was discovered :P

Despite that, I still think that 25 GB/s of external bandwidth shared between the GPU and all the CPU cores could easily become a bottleneck. A larger texture cache would probably help, but even so it's just not a whole lot of bandwidth.
Click to expand...

Leaks aside, judging from every Nintendo system since gamecube I dont see the switch being severely bottlenecked by memory bandwith. I dont believe 25 GB/S is all there is.
 
Durante said:
For the record, I'm perfectly aware that Nvidia has been using tiled rasterization since Maxwell. It's also not a Tegra-specific feature, I was running the test program on my own GPU when this was discovered :P

Despite that, I still think that 25 GB/s of external bandwidth shared between the GPU and all the CPU cores could easily become a bottleneck. A larger texture cache would probably help, but even so it's just not a whole lot of bandwidth.
Click to expand...

So what was Wii U's external bandwidth and bus at?

I feel like if it was at...40 GB/s, it'd be a lot less of a problem
 
Donnie said:
The bandwidth issues are being exaggerated, mostly because people aren't getting the fact that the newer Tegra GPU's (including Maxwell and Parker) are tile based. For instance people are talking about needing 32MB of eSRAM like XBox One, that simply isn't needed because unlike XBox One this GPU doesn't render to a full framebuffer.

To clarify XBox One has 32MB of eSRAM so that the frame can be rendered inside the GPU, meaning the rendering process doesn't have to be done in main memory saving lots of main memory bandwidth.

Tegra renders its frames in small tiles, so it only needs a very small cache inside the GPU to hold each tile while its being rendered. Which gains the same advantage XBox One gets from its 32MB eSRAM (keeping the rendering process away from main memory). So absolutely no need for any large pool of eSRAM for framebuffers with Tegra. If anything is added memory wise then maybe they could add in some kind of extra large texture cache (wouldn't need to be anywhere near 32MB) in order to reduce the amount of texture swapping from main memory.
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I know that, Maxwell and Pascal desktop GPUs do the same thing. Still, 25.6GB/s is ridiculously low, it probably needs twice as that to avoid bandwidth related bottlenecks, even after considering Pascal's color compression which reduces the bandwidth needed even more. A bit of SRAM is needed, not sure how much it would add to cost but they used 32MB eDRAM on Wii U so it shouldn't be an issue.
 
I feel like this mem bandwidth thing kinda depends on what level of visual fidelity Nintendo is targeting.

I dont think we have a good idea of what they are expecting out of this system yet.
 
KingBroly said:
25GB/s feels like a really low jump then. Unless it's some non-final dev kit thing
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Why are we assuming 25 instead of 50 now has there been some update saying it's not Parker?

Either way how would double the bandwidth not be enough for 1080p when the wiiU was capable of that?
 
Akhe said:
The Switch does have some good features but the best is when it's running in the dock mode and suddenly the power goes down, you can still playing for 3~4h.
Click to expand...

You mean it will also power your TV? Or ... take it out of the dock.

MacTag said:
Is there actually a source for 25GB/s specifically besides the unreliable one in the OP?
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Vern said the same thing... but more importantly, it's standard for a Tegra X1.

bomblord1 said:
Why are we assuming 25 instead of 50 now has there been some update saying it's not Parker?
Click to expand...

Nobody ever said it was going to be Parker, i believe. It has been rumored that the GPU would be Pascal. Pascal is being used in Parker, but that doesn't mean it (Switch) will use Parker, it most likely won't, since those Denver cores are supposedly not very efficient for gaming purposes, and it has also been stated to be a custom job... meaning not "Parker" as such. What we do know, is that the devkit used a TX1, which means 25GBs. If they just shrink the TX1 down on a 16nm node, then it'd still be at the same bandwidth. If they take Parker as a starting point and swap out the Denver cores, i would assume they would keep the 128 bit bus?
 
bomblord1 said:
Why are we assuming 25 instead of 50 now has there been some update saying it's not Parker?

Either way how would double the bandwidth not be enough for 1080p when the wiiU was capable of that?
Click to expand...

1 retail Wii U game supported native 1080p. ONE. And sacrifices were made to get it there. For most games, devs are not going to be willing to make sacrifices to get it onto a platform if it takes an arm and a leg to do it.
 
Vena said:
No I get that, its not going to change drastically regardless of what the final unit may be using (even on a 16nm shrink, the best it will get up to is 51.2GB/s), but the reason we're curious is because such a bottleneck on RAM is very un-Nintendo. They tend to favor small, high-speed RAM somewhere on the die to serve as the buffer to a bigger, slower RAM pool.

But right now we only know of the latter and not of the former, making this device and this specific bottleneck very unusual.
Click to expand...

Skittzo0413 said:
25GB/s would be lower than even the Wii U, no? As has been pointed out many times in this thread Nintendo has never really skimped on RAM so I would very much expect that number to change for final retail units.

That would be an insane, unnecessary and highly out of character bottleneck.
Click to expand...

I remember Wii U RAM's bandwidth being half of what these Switch rumours say, though. Didn't that turn out to be the case?
 
bomblord1 said:
Either way how would double the bandwidth not be enough for 1080p when the wiiU was capable of that?
Click to expand...

Leaving architectural differences aside, the Wii U has 32MB of eDRAM.

Measuring memory bandwidth against a target resolution doesn't necessarily much sense, though. Raw resolution is not a sufficient indicator for bandwidth requirements. The more important aspect here is the balance between what the GPU is capable of eating and what its memory architecture is capable of feeding.
 
Matt said:
I 100% agree calling it "a portable with TV out" is, well, stupid.

In terms of how the system works, it knows when it is docked, and when it isn't. There is no third mode (again, as of now, and as is my understanding).
Click to expand...

I hope Nintendo requires all games to match dock mode performances when in handheld mode.
 
Mpl90 said:
I remember Wii U RAM's bandwidth being half of what these Switch rumours say, though. Didn't that turn out to be the case?
Click to expand...
It has 32 mb edram and lots of smaller caches though. It has sufficient bandwidth for how weak the system is, it's not a.bottleneck.There has never been a developer complaining about the Wii U's memory.
 
Note: This probably means nothing and is speculation. Nvidia uses TSMC for their GPUs.

After reading the poorly written article from that thread about TSMC which I posted in the last page. I went to look at TSMC earnings call transcripts for the last two quarters. Although I doubt this confirms anything as it may be reading too much into things.

http://www.tsmc.com/english/investorRelations/quarterly_results.htm

I looked at the Earnings Conference Transcripts for the 2Q and 3Q for 2016. Anytime I looked up gaming or game, it referenced their 16nm FinFet. (This would include PC gaming.)

For example from the 3Q:

As to our 16-nanometer FinFET, the defect density and cycle time continue to improve and are very competitive. In addition to mobile application processor, other applications such as cellular baseband, graphic processor for video game, AR/VR, deep learning and AI have strongly adopted our 16-nanometer solutions. As a result, our 16-nanometer business this year is expected to become more than five-fold of this level compared to last year.
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This next part was also interesting but again, doesn't really mean anything. It's just from noticing Thraktor speculate how a 16nm FFC could be a possible node process for the GPU.

From the 2Q:

We expect our 16-nanometer business will continue to increase in the second half of this year, with most of the products adopting our 16FFC, which is a low-power and low-cost version of the 16-nanometer process. We expect to generate more than 20% wafer revenue from 16-nanometer in this year.

For example, to meet the changing market requirements, we introduced a low-cost, low-power version 16FFC this year after 16-nanometer started volume production last year. We also lowered the operating voltage of our 16-nanometer process to 0.5 volt to meet the requirement for IoT applications.
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All of this probably doesn't mean anything. It was brought up since some people think the Switch GPU will be 20nm, unless a leak happens to show what the actual GPU die size is, we would have to wait for the actual reveal of the Switch in January.
(Because TSMC has their fourth quarter earnings on the 12th of January 2017 which is 1 day before the Switch is revealed.)
 
KingBroly said:
1 retail Wii U game supported native 1080p. ONE. And sacrifices were made to get it there. For most games, devs are not going to be willing to make sacrifices to get it onto a platform if it takes an arm and a leg to do it.
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What the one game? I can think of Zelda Wind Waker, Smash, Monster Hunter and Rayman off the top of my head. Or where those not native? Also what were the sacrifices?
 
KingBroly said:
1 retail Wii U game supported native 1080p. ONE. And sacrifices were made to get it there. For most games, devs are not going to be willing to make sacrifices to get it onto a platform if it takes an arm and a leg to do it.
Click to expand...

Smash Bros
Windwaker HD
Twiligh Princess HD
Rayman Legends

Those 4 are native 1080p just off the top of my head.

I agree that 720P was standard on the platform but if we are looking at something between 2-4x the bandwidth how would that be a bottleneck for resolution?
 
KingBroly said:
1 retail Wii U game supported native 1080p. ONE. And sacrifices were made to get it there. For most games, devs are not going to be willing to make sacrifices to get it onto a platform if it takes an arm and a leg to do it.
Click to expand...
Smash, DQX, MH3U, Wind Waker HD, Twilight Princess HD and Rayman Legends all supported 1080p on Wii U. Some other multiplats like Skylanders or Lego likely did as well.
 
A 2D game and last-gen or portable up-ports aren't really the best metric here. By that metric PS3 was totally 1080p-ready as well.
 
bomblord1 said:
Smash Bros
Windwaker HD
Twiligh Princess HD
Rayman Legends

Those 4 are native 1080p just off the top of my head.

I agree that 720P was standard on the platform but if we are looking at something between 2-4x the bandwidth how would that be a bottleneck for resolution?
Click to expand...

It's more about pixel density than resolution. Wii U could handle a blank screen at 4k probably. But start adding more and more textures, more polygons, more effects, and the resolution goes down with it.

I guess I should've said non-remake, but Rayman does fit I guess. But 1080 was far from the norm on the system.
 
KingBroly said:
1 retail Wii U game supported native 1080p. ONE. And sacrifices were made to get it there. For most games, devs are not going to be willing to make sacrifices to get it onto a platform if it takes an arm and a leg to do it.
Click to expand...

I can think of like 4 or 5 1080p Wii U retail games off the top of my head. It wasn't that uncommon.
 
KingBroly said:
1 retail Wii U game supported native 1080p. ONE. And sacrifices were made to get it there. For most games, devs are not going to be willing to make sacrifices to get it onto a platform if it takes an arm and a leg to do it.
Click to expand...

I don't think memory bandwidth was the main hurdle towards 1080p, GPU raw performance on the other hand seemed like a much bigger problem, 176 gflops can only take you so far.
 
Durante said:
A 2D game and last-gen or portable up-ports aren't really the best metric here. By that metric PS3 was totally 1080p-ready as well.
Click to expand...
If we're looking at (minimum) 2-3x the GPU increase then 720p Wii U fare like MK8, Splatoon and BOTW shouldn't be too difficult to run 1080p on Switch right? Also PS3/360 ports generally (Skyrim, NBA 2K, etc).

Reminds me of PS4 Pro where the only 4k native retail games are PS3 remasters or cross-gen sports games.
 
bomblord1 said:
Smash Bros
Windwaker HD
Twiligh Princess HD
Rayman Legends

Those 4 are native 1080p just off the top of my head.

I agree that 720P was standard on the platform but if we are looking at something between 2-4x the bandwidth how would that be a bottleneck for resolution?
Click to expand...

Main memory bandwidth isn't going to be any kind of significant bottleneck for target resolution. Going from 720p to 1080p on Tegra means more tiles to render and more pixels to process, but most of that is kept inside the GPU. The effect on main memory bandwidth wouldn't be very significant at all. Of course as you increase texture resolution that's going to be limited more by main memory bandwidth. Which is the reason I've suggested a large texture cache being added as a possibility to alleviate bandwidth issues.
 
Jaded Alyx said:
I'm really intrigued about what the USB ports on the dock are for considering there's no external HDD support...
Click to expand...

What did the USB ports on the original Wii do?

No seriously I can't think of anything I ever did with it aside from plugging a mic in it for a really bad karaoke game.
 
Mpl90 said:
I remember Wii U RAM's bandwidth being half of what these Switch rumours say, though. Didn't that turn out to be the case?
Click to expand...

The 32MB of eDRAM gave it a higher "effective" bandwidth I thought. I'm not sure about it but that's what I recall being said.

Either way it seems like Nvidia (and Tegra chips specifically) do get more out of the bandwidth they have, so maybe 25GB/s isn't as bad as I originally thought. Either way, I'd be surprised if RAM isn't one of the areas where the custom Nvidia SoC differs from a standard TX1. It is essentially in Nintendo's DNA.
 
Durante said:
For the record, I'm perfectly aware that Nvidia has been using tiled rasterization since Maxwell. It's also not a Tegra-specific feature, I was running the test program on my own GPU when this was discovered :P

Despite that, I still think that 25 GB/s of external bandwidth shared between the GPU and all the CPU cores could easily become a bottleneck. A larger texture cache would probably help, but even so it's just not a whole lot of bandwidth.
Click to expand...

If they remain on a 64-bit bus, they'll need some embedded memory to make up the difference. It would make a lot more sense to go with a 128-bit bus, with the price and size of SRAM at 14/16nm, and they'd actually have more bandwidth per SM than a GTX 1080, with plenty left over for the CPU cores.
 
Skittzo0413 said:
The 32MB of eDRAM gave it a higher "effective" bandwidth I thought. I'm not sure about it but that's what I recall being said.
Click to expand...

Basically the 32MB eDRAM kept most GPU access away from main memory, saving loads of main memory bandwidth. Tegra's mode of rendering (tbr) does much the same thing without having to have that 32MB eDRAM.
 
bomblord1 said:
What did the USB ports on the original Wii do?

No seriously I can't think of anything I ever did with it aside from plugging a mic in it for a really bad karaoke game.
Click to expand...

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Personally, I don't care much.

Nintendo is gonna make the most of it like they always do.
If third-parties abandon the system, I already have a PS4 for that. And a decent PC. And if you care that much about third-parties, so do you.
 
ozfunghi said:
Vern said the same thing... but more importantly, it's standard for a Tegra X1.

Nobody ever said it was going to be Parker, i believe. It has been rumored that the GPU would be Pascal. Pascal is being used in Parker, but that doesn't mean it (Switch) will use Parker, it most likely won't, since those Denver cores are supposedly not very efficient for gaming purposes, and it has also been stated to be a custom job... meaning not "Parker" as such. What we do know, is that the devkit used a TX1, which means 25GBs. If they just shrink the TX1 down on a 16nm node, then it'd still be at the same bandwidth. If they take Parker as a starting point and swap out the Denver cores, i would assume they would keep the 128 bit bus?
Click to expand...
It's already been confirmed it's a custom SOC (and heavily rumored to be Pascal based) so X1 should probably be disregarded despite being in reference hardware/devkits.

Only one source said Parker so far but they likely just meant Pascal.
 
BY2K said:
Personally, I don't care much.

Nintendo is gonna make the most of it like they always do.
If third-parties abandon the system, I already have a PS4 for that. And a decent PC. And if you care that much about third-parties, so do you.
Click to expand...

Personally, I only get consoles for the exclusive games. I'll get a PS4 for The Last Guardian(I actually got a PS3 for that game, so I've waited long) and the Switch for whatever Nintendo comes up with. The PC takes care of the rest.
 
Some tech questions for you guys...

How much more powerful is the Switch compared to Wii U?

Is there enough power under the hood to make say Mario Kart 8 a noticably better looking game?

What advantages does 4GB of RAM give the machine compared to what the Wii U had?
 
TheMagician said:
Some tech questions for you guys...

How much more powerful is the Switch compared to Wii U?

Is there enough power under the hood to make say Mario Kart 8 a noticably better looking game?

What advantages does 4GB of RAM give the machine compared to what the Wii U had?
Click to expand...

If we go by the custom chip beeing equal(in some form or other) to the Tegra X1, we will se a good leap over the Wii U. 4x computational performance, 2x the memory bandwidth and in general a much more modern architecture. I think a better looking MK8 wouldn't be out of the quesion, though I feel they wil probably focus on making it run at 1080p on the TV.

As for RAM, the Wii U has 1GB available for games, while the rumors indicate 3.2GB for the Switch. That's a pretty big leap as well.
 
Still praying for A72's.

Also, doesn't the Tegra line use 3GB increments of memory? If so I could see the final unit having 6GB LPDDR4.

5GB for games (on par with available ram of Xbox One) and 1GB for OS.

And since it has active cooling and can dock, I expect the gpu clock speed to be around 1.4Ghz or so. CPU around 1.8Ghz.
 
10k said:
Still praying for A72's.

Also, doesn't the Tegra line use 3GB increments of memory? If so I could see the final unit having 6GB LPDDR4.

5GB for games (on par with available ram of Xbox One) and 1GB for OS.

And since it has active cooling and can dock, I expect the gpu clock speed to be around 1.4Ghz or so. CPU around 1.8Ghz.
Click to expand...

That's more or less the machine i was expecting, with lower clocks but 3 SM for the GPU instead of 2, 4.5GB of RAM for games (with 1.5 for the OS) and 4MB SRAM.

CPU: 4 A72 up to 1.9GHZ when docked+4 A53 1.2GHZ (2 for games, 2 for OS)
GPU: 3 SM up to 1GHZ when docked (768gflops max)
RAM: 6GB LPDDR4 (128bit bus, 51.2GB/s, 1-1.5GB for the OS)+4MB SRAM
Storage: 32GB+micro SD
Battery: 3-4 hours, USB-C charging
249$

If the specs are pretty much really those of the Jetson TX1 though, this is not gonna happen.
 
Rodin said:
That's more or less the machine i was expecting, with lower clocks but 3 SM for the GPU instead of 2 and maybe 4.5GB of RAM with 1.5 for the OS (and 4MB SRAM). If the specs are pretty much really those of the Jetson TX1 though, this is not gonna happen.
Click to expand...
I mean I believe the leader who said 3.2GB is available to them right now but that might just be Nintendo being conservative about what they need for their OS.

Sony switched to 8GB for PS4 relatively late.

Even at 720p, games use the same assets as 1080p so I'm worried 3.2 might not be enough even with optimization and compression.

But I'm not a dev so I don't know.
 
I tell ya, what I'm concerned about is the OS having less than a gig to work with. The Wii U OS was an interminable slog and if the Switch one isn't nice and peppy and modern feeling it's gonna be a huge bummer.
 
So in terms of visuals what can we expect? Slightly better looking Wii U level, nowhere near Xbox One?

Just in case my hype needed to be lower.
 
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