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[Brad Grenz]

This is seriously disingenuous. No, Nintendo cannot feasibly compete with companies like Sony and Microsoft in terms of manufacturing powerful tech at scale in the year 2017. Nintendo is a valuable company with a lot of cash, but that's an incomplete picture of their situation versus their competitors.

What they can do is innovate laterally by pursuing strategies their competitors aren't incentivized to pursue and finding new ways to provide value without increasing cost.

Nintendo have enormous cash reserves and both Sony and Microsoft largely outsource their console designs. The idea that Nintendo could not afford to produce comparable tech is complete nonsense. AMD or nVidia would happily sell them a semi custom APU design that is right in line with what the PS4 and Xbox One use. Foxconn would happily manufacture the consoles at a very high rate. Nintendo just don't want to do that.

 

[EDarkness]

As long as you remember to dot your i's and cross your t's

A Lot check that I found hilarious, given the above context, and that meeting them is literally dotting your i's & crossing your t's

Heh, heh. Most of the standards they have are related to visual things like what you mentioned. Standard wording, legible text, etc. Some of it is crazy, but I guess I can understand why they're that way.

 

[Polygonal_Sprite]

You have to take a lot into consideration though.

- How much is a port of a game that big - 1 million? 3?
- How many sales do you think the console will do in your projected timeframe? Even if the game sold gangbusters (20% attach rate like on other platforms) will that make you profit over your expenditure?
- Are most of the people who want the game already on a console powerful enough to play it. If so, why bother with the Switch version?
- Even if the numbers do come out as generating profit you have to also then think "OK, if we spent the same amount on something else, would we make more money"

Its closer to 50 grand than a million for a simple port. A small team of three or four people can port it over in a few months.

Marketing is the expensive part but Nintendo could pay for that to encourage big name ports.

 

[Pokemaniac]

I think one of the most frustrating ones was that Microsoft wouldn't license a game if it used both Kinect body detection and a controller or any sort of prop, because since marketing / higher ups decided that it was controllerless, that meant ALWAYS controllerless. No matter what. You could only use voice commands in a controller game.

The developers behind Baller Beats had to convince Microsoft to let people use a basketball.

Meanwhile over on Wii you could literally let people use a cardboard box with your game as a peripheral.

The sad thing about this is that pairing Kinect with a controller (preferably a split one like Wiimote and Nunchuk) was probably the only thing that could have made it not a failure as a gaming input device.

 

[rekameohs]

As long as you remember to dot your i's and cross your t's

A Lot check that I found hilarious, given the above context, and that meeting them is literally dotting your i's & crossing your t's

Here's an example of that exact thing happening internally as well.

https://www.metroid2002.com/version_differences_font.php

 

[Schnozberry]

This is seriously disingenuous. No, Nintendo cannot feasibly compete with companies like Sony and Microsoft in terms of manufacturing powerful tech at scale in the year 2017. Nintendo is a valuable company with a lot of cash, but that's an incomplete picture of their situation versus their competitors.

What they can do is innovate laterally by pursuing strategies their competitors aren't incentivized to pursue and finding new ways to provide value without increasing cost.

Nintendo has a market cap in the 10s of billions of dollars. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D. They have partnerships with top technology vendors, and some highly talented engineers on staff, many of whom worked previously at places like AMD, Nvidia, and Microsoft. Their supply chain problems are the stuff of legend, but that's due to their fiscal conservatism and poor demand forecasting more than anything else. Sony and Microsoft don't own console manufacturing facilities, they use Foxconn, Flextronics, and others just like Nintendo does.

They don't make competitive hardware simply because they choose not to. You could successfully make the argument that it would have been near impossible 12 years ago to compete with the type of loss leading that Sony and Microsoft were willing to do in order to buy market share, but that was over a decade ago and Sony and Microsoft have both learned from that mistake. Their products aimed at the mainstream are profitable, far from the bleeding edge, using proven and mature technology. So, you could say that Nintendo's design philosophy rubbed off on them a little.

 

[bomblord1]

Nintendo has a market cap in the 10s of billions of dollars. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D. They have partnerships with top technology vendors, and some highly talented engineers on staff, many of whom worked previously at places like AMD, Nvidia, and Microsoft. Their supply chain problems are the stuff of legend, but that's due to their fiscal conservatism and poor demand forecasting more than anything else. Sony and Microsoft don't own console manufacturing facilities, they use Foxconn, Flextronics, and others just like Nintendo does.

They don't make competitive hardware simply because they choose not to. You could successfully make the argument that it would have been near impossible 12 years ago to compete with the type of loss leading that Sony and Microsoft were willing to do in order to buy market share, but that was over a decade ago and Sony and Microsoft have both learned from that mistake. Their products aimed at the mainstream are profitable, far from the bleeding edge, using proven and mature technology. So, you could say that Nintendo's design philosophy rubbed off on them a little.

Microsoft as a company spends more in a single year than Nintendo's entire net worth.

 

[darkazcura]

Microsoft as a company spends more in a single year than Nintendo's entire net worth.

Does their gaming division? Talking about how big Sony and Microsoft are right now is kind of meaningless because neither coming has all of their assets in their gaming divisions.

For a comparison, you'd have to see how much Sony and Microsoft spent on R&D for the PS4 and One and see if Nintendo could potentially afford that. I'd wager they could if they wanted to or if that was the direction they wanted to take.

What exactly did that poster post that was so wrong? It's probably pretty true.

 

[z0m3le]

Not every Nintendo thread has to become a history lesson does it? In this hardware thread, the Switch is miles apart from Nintendo's previous hardware, sure I would have been pleasantly surprised to see 4SM pascal at 500mhz and 4 A72 cores at 1.5ghz+ with 6GB 68GB/s lpddr4, and 1.25ghz gpu when docked, but this is the first time Nintendo has ever had the same development pipeline as Sony, this is the first time all 3 platforms have had a standard and I'm sorry but development has moved to an extremely scalable state where Intel integrated GPUs make up a large portion of the PC platform, which has become the primary platform for developers, so there is little technical reason to worry about the undocked specs, especially when the device has so much room to increase clock speeds, and we've even heard that it can do docked clocks on the go.

Switch isn't behind in tech this time, in fact switch is more modern a platform than even ps4 pro, it isn't as powerful but that is a short lived victory that could mean very little as time moves forward, just look at Scorpio or SCD as a possible scenario. Switch is the most modular design we've ever seen as a platform, and I am not sure we can commit to its antiquity based on low clocks that were from months ago when we've seen retail products on the market for years see their clocks change and Nintendo's history of revisions in hardware.

 

[iamaustrian]

Microsoft as a company spends more in a single year than Nintendo's entire net worth.

yeah, so does Samsung and Google but what's your point?

 

[Malakai]

Does their gaming division? Talking about how big Sony and Microsoft are right now is kind of meaningless because neither coming has all of their assets in their gaming divisions.

For a comparison, you'd have to see how much Sony and Microsoft spent on R&D for the PS4 and One and see if Nintendo could potentially afford that. I'd wager they could if they wanted to or if that was the direction they wanted to take.

What exactly did that poster post that was so wrong? It's probably pretty true.

Do the lager size of Sony and Microsoft, Sony and Microsoft can take a larger risk. They could easy take a loss on the gaming divisions, and make up the difference from their other divisions (i.e. Azure and Office for Microsoft and Insurance and smartphone Camera modules for Sony). Nintendo, can't do that. Nintendo, only does games. So, no in the case of risks, potential losses, and purchasing power it ins't meaningless.

 

[Schnozberry]

Microsoft as a company spends more in a single year than Nintendo's entire net worth.

Microsoft dwarfs Sony's value by over 12x. If this is directly related to how much they are willing to push the envelope on hardware, how is it that Sony managed to make a more powerful console than Microsoft in 2012?

Edit: What I'm trying to say is that the Switch is a great piece of hardware, but not a competitive one, and that's because of deliberate choices, and not because Nintendo is somehow inferior and doesn't have the same resources that are available to other tech companies. They just have other priorities.

 

[z0m3le]

Do the lager size of Sony and Microsoft, Sony and Microsoft can take a larger risk. They could easy take a loss on the gaming divisions, and make up the difference from their other divisions (i.e. Azure and Office for Microsoft and Insurance and smartphone Camera modules for Sony). Nintendo, can't do that. Nintendo, only does games. So, no in the case of risks, potential losses, and purchasing power it ins't meaningless.

Pretty much, if Nintendo wanted to compete in power, Microsoft and Sony have both moved on to platforms that can see iterations that could mean a quick response and with deeper pockets, they can chase Nintendo out of the industry. Trust me if Microsoft wanted to make ps4 pro look like the wii, they could absolutely release a $400 loss leader with 12tflops and 8 core 16 thread cpu with 3ghz. Microsoft would loose billions, but if they could capture the market from Sony and kill the Playstation brand, they would see adequate value in the move. Playstation isn't in such a weak position right now, but Nintendo would be if they chased the red ocean.

 

[BuggyMike]

Pretty much, if Nintendo wanted to compete in power, Microsoft and Sony have both moved on to platforms that can see iterations that could mean a quick response and with deeper pockets, they can chase Nintendo out of the industry. Trust me if Microsoft wanted to make ps4 pro look like the wii, they could absolutely release a $400 loss leader with 12tflops and 8 core 16 thread cpu with 3ghz. Microsoft would loose billions, but if they could capture the market from Sony and kill the Playstation brand, they would see adequate value in the move. Playstation isn't in such a weak position right now, but Nintendo would be if they chased the red ocean.

This is assuming that its only about power which its not. There are many other factors that go into having successful platform. Depending on the value Nintendo's system offered versus the other two, it might not be so easy to run them out of the market by simply pushing out a more powerful system.

 

[Cuningas de Häme]

That's the thing. Nintendo needs to be very careful when they do new consoles. If they rise against S and M with similar console, they will lose. Period.

Don't be naive and think that Nintendo only has to do a clone box like the other two and it'll win. The market is not big enough for three clones. Even two is stretching like everyone can see with the sales of Xbox.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

This is assuming that its only about power which its not. There are many other factors that go into having successful platform.

I agree with you Nintendo believes this.

I do not agree that they know what those factors are.

 

[Aroll]

Pretty much, if Nintendo wanted to compete in power, Microsoft and Sony have both moved on to platforms that can see iterations that could mean a quick response and with deeper pockets, they can chase Nintendo out of the industry. Trust me if Microsoft wanted to make ps4 pro look like the wii, they could absolutely release a $400 loss leader with 12tflops and 8 core 16 thread cpu with 3ghz. Microsoft would loose billions, but if they could capture the market from Sony and kill the Playstation brand, they would see adequate value in the move. Playstation isn't in such a weak position right now, but Nintendo would be if they chased the red ocean.

In theory sure, but in practicality, no one is passing billions in losses past the board just to "buy out brands" who have basically been at this longer and have a huge stable of IP that, in value alone, can practically ensure the companies stay in the game.

I.E. - Nintendo could dive right into the red ocean and survive on their IP alone if they priced it at no money lost. Sony, Microsoft, nether are going to take on the sort of loss they would need to in order to push Nintendo out - especially Sony as they aren't exactly as liquid as they lead you to believe. They actually rely heavily on the PlayStation division to make up for their other bad divisions.

Microsoft can do anything they want, but they won't. Especially given they like Nintendo. They'd rather try to buy Nintendo outright than lose billions of dollars for the sake of
"Owning the market". Nintendo can survive on mobile and they can release less ambitious consoles for bigger games. Nintendo can't really be pushed out of market that easy.

The moral of the story - only Nintendo stops Nintendo from making competitive hardware. They decided a long time ago to get out of the race. What they are doing with the Switch IMO is the best comprMouse for all worlds that you won't see other industry leaders doing.

 

[Dremorak]

That's the thing. Nintendo needs to be very careful when they do new consoles. If they rise against S and M with similar console, they will lose. Period.

Don't be naive and think that Nintendo only has to do a clone box like the other two and it'll win. The market is not big enough for three clones. Even two is stretching like everyone can see with the sales of Xbox.

Correct. Theres no point competing in the same space for scraps.

 

[AzaK]

I doubt porting GTA V will cost a million to port. Most likely they'll put one or two guys on it, then do some QA. Don't need a huge team for this. If they want to add something to the game (motion controls or something), then maybe add another person or two. Either way, it won't reach a million dollars to port.

I was just going by Yves Guillemot's comment some time ago about rough cost to port. It'd take way more than 2 guys as they'd need to QA the thing. Then there's switch artwork required for marketing and all that jazz. There'd also be a variance based on the engine. If it's in house they may need to do a lot more work than if it was something like UE4.

 

[AzaK]

Not every Nintendo thread has to become a history lesson does it? In this hardware thread, the Switch is miles apart from Nintendo's previous hardware, sure I would have been pleasantly surprised to see 4SM pascal at 500mhz and 4 A72 cores at 1.5ghz+ with 6GB 68GB/s lpddr4, and 1.25ghz gpu when docked, but this is the first time Nintendo has ever had the same development pipeline as Sony, this is the first time all 3 platforms have had a standard and I'm sorry but development has moved to an extremely scalable state where Intel integrated GPUs make up a large portion of the PC platform, which has become the primary platform for developers, so there is little technical reason to worry about the undocked specs, especially when the device has so much room to increase clock speeds, and we've even heard that it can do docked clocks on the go.

Switch isn't behind in tech this time, in fact switch is more modern a platform than even ps4 pro, it isn't as powerful but that is a short lived victory that could mean very little as time moves forward, just look at Scorpio or SCD as a possible scenario. Switch is the most modular design we've ever seen as a platform, and I am not sure we can commit to its antiquity based on low clocks that were from months ago when we've seen retail products on the market for years see their clocks change and Nintendo's history of revisions in hardware.

So say this modularity comes to fruition with the SCD. What does that mean for cost? I mean do we pay $200 for the Switch and then another $200 for an SCD, bringing it to $400 which may not even match PS4 let alone PS4 Pro.

The only way the module design will work is if people can get PS4 pro level for about PS4 pro price.

 

[z0m3le]

So say this modularity comes to fruition with the SCD. What does that mean for cost? I mean do we pay $200 for the Switch and then another $200 for an SCD, bringing it to $400 which may not even match PS4 let alone PS4 Pro.

The only way the module design will work is if people can get PS4 pro level for about PS4 pro price.

There is little reason that a $200 dock couldn't match Scorpio, considering this last holiday you could buy a $200 GPU from Nvidia with 6GB VRAM and match the 6TFLOPs RX 480 (and exceed it in many games)

The dock alone is going to cost you maybe $15 dollars to manufacture, leaving plenty of room for a 4+ tflop GPU in the dock for retail $199. They could market it as a 4k dock and heck they only really need 4GB VRAM in the dock rather than the 6GB, so they could probably even undercut that price point, and that is just this year, next year they might be able to do it for $99, it's hard to say really, but the idea behind SCD makes a good amount of sense for Nintendo to pursue if they want to pass hi fidelity graphics cost onto the customers, could even add 4K DLC packs to games just for texture packs.

Again given what we know, there should be plenty of overhead in Switch for higher clocks too, I'm not technically aware of a reason that the A57 cores couldn't hit 1.5ghz even portable other than battery life, I mean another ~watt of power draw isn't going to mean much, and that should put it in line with about 6 jaguar cores at 1.6ghz like PS4.

We also have iterations to think about, a "NEW" Switch could be over twice as powerful in the same power envelope and even match PS4 if they wanted to, people tend to think that power envelopes make it impossible, but 4SM @1.25ghz on 16nm pascal with 4 A72 cores @ 1.7ghz (same power draw as 4 A57 cores @1ghz 20nm btw) would draw less than 20watts and that should be fine for the docked device, which with the same performance ratio gives you 512gflops portable. (this is just speculation on a future iteration, while the technology was available to do this last year, no one should have expected this and it was always a best case scenario, but for an iteration, it makes a lot of sense, as it would handle the rumored Switch specs docked performance on the go)

The true innovation here though is how modular the design really is, I mean Nintendo can have you plug the switch into any new gimmick they want. VR? check! some stand alone new device powered by switch? check! overclocking the switch adds plenty of performance as well, because even the version of the switch we've been talking about for the last few pages is capable of CPU performance on par with PS4 pro (if upclocked) and GPU could match up to half of XB1 if upclocked when docked.

They can use switch as a trojan for pretty much any new idea they want to push since it really is just a stand alone screen with capable cpu performance and a modern GPU that ensures compatibility with the industry's gaming pipeline.

 

[balohna]

I doubt porting GTA V will cost a million to port. Most likely they'll put one or two guys on it, then do some QA. Don't need a huge team for this. If they want to add something to the game (motion controls or something), then maybe add another person or two. Either way, it won't reach a million dollars to port.

Its closer to 50 grand than a million for a simple port. A small team of three or four people can port it over in a few months.

Marketing is the expensive part but Nintendo could pay for that to encourage big name ports.

Sounds like a straight Xbox 360 port without proper optimization and probably buggy as hell. Maybe 4 people if you don't count QA, but that would be a good producer and 3 SENIOR engineers. Porting/optimizing is not something you want to trust to someone without experience. Probably less than a year to dev, but including testing and bug fixing I would guess that's a 6 month project. I'm probably being optimistic. QA would need to run a full test plan against it, and if they find a lot of bugs that could mean pulling in more engineers. This would probably all be outsourced to another studio, so there's some overhead there too.

As other people have said, T2 is probably better off spending the money on something else.

 

[z0m3le]

Sounds like a straight Xbox 360 port without proper optimization and probably buggy as hell. Maybe 4 people if you don't count QA, but that would be a good producer and 3 SENIOR engineers. Porting/optimizing is not something you want to trust to someone without experience. Probably less than a year to dev, but including testing and bug fixing I would guess that's a 6 month project. I'm probably being optimistic. QA would need to run a full test plan against it, and if they find a lot of bugs that could mean pulling in more engineers. This would probably all be outsourced to another studio, so there's some overhead there too.

As other people have said, T2 is probably better off spending the money on something else.

The investment could directly be applied to mobile considering vulkan and ARM architecture... How many GTA games can you play on Mobile? GTA 4 hasn't made it over yet right? I'd guess that is next, but the quicker they get GTA Online on mobile, the more money they will make, and honestly, I could play hunting pack on a phone just fine... I'd enjoy that a great deal actually.

Now if Rockstar would allow their account to work across different platforms, a Switch port of GTAV makes a whole lot more sense, if I can buy crates and collect cars on the go through out the week and sell stuff on the weekend? I'd be willing to buy it at a high price!

Something to think about with investing in the Switch is that the platform is directly in line with porting to mobile, so whatever investment they make in a switch port should be directly applied to any mobile ports they want to make, this is at least something to add to the conversation, as mobile as a platform is starting to compete with consoles, and miracast like technology is going to be very interesting in future TVs, will consoles be important when all you need is a decent controller going forward? The market is always changing and considering how quickly mobile has taken over in the past 8 years and how that technology is growing, there is no real reason phones won't match current consoles before the decade is out.

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

Pretty much anything targeted at platforms where the GTAV/RDR2/etc. audience already, demonstrably is?

A port team on port time, producing something new that will sell millions? Or adding 3% more polish to RDR2, resulting in millions more sales?

 

[Earendil]

I've always said if you plow a field but don't plant anything, you don't get mad at the dirt when nothing grows.

However, I think this might be a better illustration:

A farmer (Nintendo) gives growers (3rd parties) a plot of land on his farm. He has not plowed it, but tells them they can do whatever they want with it. One of the growers plows part of the field, and plants good food. This turns out well and he is happy. Another grower splices potatoes with carrots and randomly buries them in different spots. He gets a weird batch of potarrots, and no one buys them. A third grower plows part of the field, but plants nothing in it. Finally EA comes along, puts gasoline into the irrigation system and burns the entire field to the ground.

The end.

 

[M3d10n]

That's actually a really good point I had not considered, I would have thought Nintendo were more stringent with TRC's than their competition rather than less, I honestly hadn't considered the possibility that they could actually be giving 3rd parties more leeway and providing too much freedom for 3rd parties, for better or worse.

Interesting.

That ended years ago. You can go to developer.nintendo.com right now, create a developer account and be reading all the TRCs and development documents you can find in under 10 minutes.

 

[Gamer @ Heart]

Why do people keep bringing up a dock SPU.

Any game that requires you do never remove it from the dock, destroys the entire point/branding/existance of the hardware.

Think about it for a second.

 

[Schnozberry]

Correct. Theres no point competing in the same space for scraps.

Here's the thing: You can have competitive hardware, and still take a blue ocean approach to software creation, and have it both ways.

Hardware power and blue ocean software are not mutually exclusive phenomenons.

 

[sonto340]

Here's the thing: You can have competitive hardware, and still take a blue ocean approach to software creation, and have it both ways.

Hardware power and blue ocean software are not mutually exclusive phenomenons.

Nintendo will never take a loss on hardware.
Having a machine that is equal in power to an Xbox on a shelf next to it for $100+ more is suicide.

 

[Skittzo0413]

Here's the thing: You can have competitive hardware, and still take a blue ocean approach to software creation, and have it both ways.

Hardware power and blue ocean software are not mutually exclusive phenomenons.

To be fair we still don't know for sure what they have with the Switch. It could be more SMs, more CPU cores, or a late clock boost. Or they did go with a 28nm process and are selling it at $200, which could make up for it. I think it's too early to judge what they've done with the given form factor as non-competitive yet.

Not that I'm expecting it to be better than what we're thinking, but it could happen.

Nintendo will never take a loss on hardware.
Having a machine that is equal in power to an Xbox on a shelf next to it for $100+ more is suicide.

They've actually done this several times, most recently with the Wii U and the 3DS price cut.

 

[Schnozberry]

Nintendo will never take a loss on hardware.
Having a machine that is equal in power to an Xbox on a shelf next to it for $100+ more is suicide.

There is no reason Nintendo couldn't have released competitive hardware at a profit in 2017. Microsoft and Sony weren't even cutting edge in 2012. We're now over 4 years down the road.

 

[frankie_baby]

Nintendo will never take a loss on hardware.
Having a machine that is equal in power to an Xbox on a shelf next to it for $100+ more is suicide.

They've taken loses on the gamecube, the ds, the 3ds and the wii u at at least some points in their respective lives

 

[Gamer @ Heart]

There is no reason Nintendo couldn't have released competitive hardware at a profit in 2017. Microsoft and Sony weren't even cutting edge in 2012. We're now over 4 years down the road.

Of COURSE there is a reason.

They have different priorities and goals

You weren't going to get competitive hardware in any reasonably priced/sized device like the switch in early 2017.

 

[Schnozberry]

To be fair we still don't know for sure what they have with the Switch. It could be more SMs, more CPU cores, or a late clock boost. Or they did go with a 28nm process and are selling it at $200, which could make up for it. I think it's too early to judge what they've done with the given form factor as non-competitive yet.

Not that I'm expecting it to be better than what we're thinking, but it could happen.

The Switch is still an unknown, but we're taking about whether it will be 1/5th or 1/4th of a PS4. It will be a marvel of a portable in comparison to what's out there, but it's not competitive with consoles.

 

[M3d10n]

That's not what a TRC is, they don't outline features, but more mundane arbitrary rules for things like "Don't make the console shit the bed" and "Don't make the user wait for longer than XX seconds" etc.

None (that I'm aware of) have ever been anything other than fairly generic across all titles on the platform.

And those rules are pretty much the same on Sony and Microsoft systems as well. They all have things like naming conventions, require games to not stay stuck in a static screen for longer than 10 seconds (so the player doesn't think the game crashed), require the game to react in specific ways to certain system events (like plugging/unplugging controllers, switching user accounts mid-game, going offline, bringing up the OS UI, etc).

There's nothing really weird in TRCs, they're intended to make sure the game works properly and interacts correctly with the OS features at a bare minimum. Even Steam has a TRC.

Many developers see them as a chore, but then those same developers would probably create PC games that crash when running in an OS in a language other than English, leave junk files all over the system when uninstalled or have major visual glitches in AMD/Intel GPUs because the developers only ran the game in two different NVidia GPUs before shipping, so there's no escaping having to deal with these "chores" after spending the whole development cycle not caring about them, regardless of platform.

 

[Schnozberry]

Of COURSE there is a reason.

They have different priorities and goals

You weren't going to get competitive hardware in any reasonably priced/sized device like the switch in early 2017.

Sure you could have. Go with 16nm and a few extra SM's at a reasonable clock speed, and they are spitting distance from the Xbox One.

They could have taken the same approach with much lower clocks while mobile.

 

[Skittzo0413]

The Switch is still an unknown, but we're taking about whether it will be 1/5th or 1/4th of a PS4. It will be a marvel of a portable in comparison to what's out there, but it's not competitive with consoles.

Well I thought the conversation was about what they could do with this particular device given their resources, and I don't think there's any reasonable way to get a device with this particular form factor to PS4 levels of power. Regardless of how much money Nintendo has.

It's all about their priorities.

 

[Schnozberry]

Well I thought the conversation was about what they could do with this particular device given their resources, and I don't think there's any reasonable way to get a device with this particular form factor to PS4 levels of power. Regardless of how much money Nintendo has.

It's all about their priorities.

They don't need to be at the same power level as the PS4. Half a PS4 while docked would have made porting a much more realistic prospect.

 

[DrROBschiz]

The Switch is still an unknown, but we're taking about whether it will be 1/5th or 1/4th of a PS4. It will be a marvel of a portable in comparison to what's out there, but it's not competitive with consoles.

True

Its good enough for me though

As a second system and Nintendo platform I am extremely pleased with everything I have seen and heard thus far

Itll replace my Vita as my most played system and I can get all my high end stuff on my PS4

Lets go bros!

 

[Gamer @ Heart]

Sure you could have. Go with 16nm and a few extra SM's at a reasonable clock speed, and they are spitting distance from the Xbox One.

They could have taken the same approach with much lower clocks while mobile.

There are a thousand other factors in releasing sub $300 hardware like this outside of chip sizes and clockspeed. There needs to be a balance between everything.

People in this forum talk about technology like it's fucking Legos and building hardware is as easy as picking the right color blocks.

 

[Skittzo0413]

They don't need to be at the same power level as the PS4. Half a PS4 while docked would have made porting a much more realistic prospect.

Well porting appears to be a non-issue anyway which may actually suggest something closer to half a PS4 in real world performance. The more modern architecture surely helps there, even if the flops are a good deal lower.

Basically all I'm saying is a portable PS4 isn't really feasible in the form factor Nintendo seems to want, regardless of the amount of money they're willing (or able) to spend. A portable machine capable of any PS4 port may be though, and hopefully is what they went for.

 

[Hermii]

They don't need to be at the same power level as the PS4. Half a PS4 while docked would have made porting a much more realistic prospect.

It has never been more viable to make a portable with home console games than now, with how much mobile tech has evolved the last half decade and how weak current consoles are especially on the CPU side.

Looks like Nintendo won't though.

 

[Schnozberry]

Well porting appears to be a non-issue anyway which may actually suggest something closer to half a PS4 in real world performance. The more modern architecture surely helps there, even if the flops are a good deal lower.

Basically all I'm saying is a portable PS4 isn't really feasible in the form factor Nintendo seems to want, regardless of the amount of money they're willing (or able) to spend. A portable machine capable of any PS4 port may be though, and hopefully is what they went for.

No, a portable PS4 isn't, that we agree on. But we're talking about them lightly modifying an off the shelf configuration and making it worse than originally intended, when it had already released in a similar form factor at higher performance. This is likely because they were concerned about reaching some arbitrary line in the sand on power consumption, or couldn't be bothered to spend a few extra dollars per unit on a larger battery.

It's easy to argue that they are just trying to save every penny they can to pass on the savings to consumers, but I would gladly pay an extra $50 for the extra horsepower needed for the possibility of a greater variety of software, and a battery that lasts an extra hour or two.

 

[Gotdatmoney]

It has never been more viable to make a portable with home console games than now, with how much mobile tech has evolved the last half decade and how weak current consoles are especially on the CPU side.

Looks like Nintendo won't though.

Nintendo gonna Nintendo.

 

[MacTag]

It has never been more viable to make a portable with home console games than now, with how much mobile tech has evolved the last half decade and how weak current consoles are especially on the CPU side.

Looks like Nintendo won't though.

As is Switch comes closer to console parity than any other handheld has. The previous winner was probably PSP in 2004.

 

[Easy_D]

The only console makers I know with "feature requirements" in their TRCs and licensing are Sony and Microsoft.

Nintendo never required use of motion on Wii, and didn't even require the use of touch on DS.

Stupid decisions lay solely at the feet of third parties whenever they do stupid shit.

Factually wrong, they definitely mandated touch controls in earlier DS games, it's why Dawn of Sorrow made you draw on the screen to beat bosses, according to Koji Igarashi.
Wouldn't surprise me if that was the case with the Wii as well.

 

[MacTag]

Factually wrong, they definitely mandated touch controls in earlier DS games, it's why Dawn of Sorrow made you draw on the screen to beat bosses, according to Koji Igarashi.
Wouldn't surprise me if that was the case with the Wii as well.

It was encouraged but never mandated. Some games that released before DOS barely even used the touchscreen at all, some not even in gameplay.

 

[UnemployedVillain]

Factually wrong, they definitely mandated touch controls in earlier DS games, it's why Dawn of Sorrow made you draw on the screen to beat bosses, according to Koji Igarashi.
Wouldn't surprise me if that was the case with the Wii as well.

There is no proof of any such mandate

 

[Thraktor]

The X1 measures 121mm^2 at 20nm (11mm x 11mm).

It's probably not 90% in comparison to HPC+, that's probably in relation to HPM. If I'm generous and say 20nm is a 1.6x density improvement over 28nm HPC+, it would be 194mm^2.

The 11mm x 11mm measurement, if I'm not mistaken, is for the package, not the die itself. The die should be a bit smaller in each dimension, although it's difficult to say by how much without dissecting it (sometimes packages can be quite a lot larger than the die if they need to cover a larger BGA).

In any case, I still don't see an enormous problem with a slightly larger die. Phones and, to a slightly lesser extent tablets, try to keep mainboard sizes as tiny as possible to save as much space as possible for batteries while maintaining an incredibly thin profile. Switch is quite a lot thicker than a typical phone or tablet, so they should be able to fit a reasonably sized battery in there without having to encroach too much on the logic board, to the point where moving from, say, a 11mm x 11mm SoC package to a 14mm x 14mm package wouldn't be a huge issue.

What's leading you to think they might be using one of these newer 28nm processes rather than 20nm? Just based on the info about the newer 28nm processes being as good as 20nm and cheaper or something else?

I mean I can't see anything we know now technically that suggests 28nm, not if its a process as power efficient as 20nm.

Here's a list of companies still making 20nm SoCs:

- MediaTek

That's it, and it's only a single die, which they introduced in late 2015 with their X20/X25 and are now using for the X23/X27. Nvidia is just about still selling 20nm TX1 based devices, but I don't imagine the chip is still being fabricated, given the Shield TV is about to be replaced. In fact, I'm not aware of a single new 20nm chip going into production over the whole of 2016, let alone 2017. With the exception of a handful of high-end mobile SoCs over 2014-2015, everyone's either moving straight to finfet or sticking on 28nm.

There doesn't seem to be much of a reason to use 20nm. The price is too close to 16nm and the performance is too close to 28nm. If it weren't for the fact that TX1 is fabbed on 20nm we probably wouldn't even be considering it. That's not to say it's impossible, though. Perhaps TSMC is offering an exceptionally good deal to use up their remaining 20nm capacity.

The clock speeds we are aware of are perfectly doable on 28nm, and if Nintendo's goal is to make Switch as affordable as possible from day one then 28nm would seem like the sensible choice.

 

[Easy_D]

There is no proof of any such mandate

Could have sworn I read that though lol D: