Reddit [verified] User shares NX info: x86 Architecture, Second screen support etc.

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Thraktor said:
To be honest I'd rule it out purely on the basis that he claims to know the final name of the console. There's absolutely no reason Nintendo would tell any third parties (let alone small indie devs) that before the public reveal. He's also far too specific about where he's working. If you're leaking info that's behind a tight NDA you want to make it difficult for the ninjas to find you, you don't just go ahead and tell them that you're in a mid-sized European developer working on an indie UE4 game that you're porting from PC.

Although, yes, his claim that CPU performance on NX exceeds PS4/XBO by about 30% is within the realm of possibility, but that doesn't mean he knows any more than you or I do.
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Yea given how few devs (if any) actually have access to devkits so far that should probably be enough for Nintendo to narrow down the potential leakers to one or two studios at most.

And maybe he really is bestest friends with everyone at Nintendo like he says because when I've been invited to have footage included in a Direct I've never seen a list of first party games included.
 
CPU power is going to be the new amazing thing everyone knows now that LCgeek has commented on it. He is reputable and gave a crude > chart that people can extrapolate how they like and now as long as they say Greater than the others they can claim some legitimacy piggybacking off his statement
 
antonz said:
CPU power is going to be the new amazing thing everyone knows now that LCgeek has commented on it. He is reputable and gave a crude > chart that people can extrapolate how they like and now as long as they say Greater than the others they can claim some legitimacy piggybacking off his statement
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Antonz haven't you had connections in the past? >__> you're always so quiet nowadays.
 
EloquentM said:
Antonz haven't you had connections in the past? >__> you're always so quiet nowadays.
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Gone indie in the time since WUST threads so not nearly as in the know about things anymore. That said Nintendo being who they are there would be no real reason for anyone outside of Nintendo to know the final device names etc. at this point. Even when Ubisoft Casablanca opened the floodgates on Wii U nothing beyond Project Café was given as a name from them.
 
antonz said:
Gone indie in the time since WUST threads so not nearly as in the know about things anymore. That said Nintendo being who they are there would be no real reason for anyone outside of Nintendo to know the final device names etc. at this point. Even when Ubisoft Casablanca opened the floodgates on Wii U nothing beyond Project Café was given as a name from them.
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Yeah, I'm less inclined to believe anything this time around especially after 2.5 years of WUST threads. Also cool to see you're in the indie scene now. Always down to support gaf devs.
 
cyberheater said:
LOL. Yep.

Where is ideaman. I think that was his name.
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The king of WUST was bgassassin.

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NEX is happening fam. I love that name too much.

Just imagining it now:

*walks into EB games*

"Hey I'd like to buy a copy of Watch Dogs 2"

"No problem, for which console?"

*pulls down glasses and leans in with emphasis*

"The En-ee-ex please".

The logo is apparently NEX in white letters with a red background like the new Nintendo logo on the YouTube videos.
 
Plinko said:
LOL at 4K and 12 GB of DDR4. Not even remotely realistic.
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4K output is not the same as rendering games in 4K. It'll be like how the PS4K will output 4K (upscale 1080p to 4K) since console scalers are better than tv scalers. Might support 4K content on Netflix and blu Rays.

He said the 12GB are for the dev kit but it's DDR4. I'm sure the NX won't have more than 8GB of ram no matter the type (DDR3 or 4).
 
10k said:
NEX is happening fam. I love that name too much.

Just imagining it now:

*walks into EB games*

"Hey I'd like to buy a copy of Watch Dogs 2"

"No problem, for which console?"

*pulls down glasses and leans in with emphasis*

"The En-ee-ex please".

The logo is apparently NEX in white letters with a red background like the new Nintendo logo on the YouTube videos.
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"Ah, you meant Nintendo Extra? Of course. I think we have some Watch Dogs 2 catridges for the Extra in the back of the store."
 
I could have sworn that after that ubisoft leak it was shown that even the WiiU can technically output 4k. Or least it was a resolution passed 1080p.
 
AdanVC said:
A Direct to be announced on the next few days uh? The last one was exactly a month ago and Directs usually happen every two months but whatever at this point I simply don't know what to expect with Nintendo anymore.
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It's funny, back in 2013 Nintendo were Direct CRAZY.

There was the BIG January Direct which featured Yoshi's Woolly World (then Yarn Yoshi), SMTxFE, Xenoblade X, Wind Waker HD, Wii Party U.

Then the February Direct, aka, the Year of Luigi Direct. This had Mario Golf: World Tour, Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, and Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D.

Then the April Direct had Yoshi's New Island, Mario Party: Island Tour, New Super Luigi U, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.

Finally in the May Direct we had Sonic Lost World and M&S Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

4 great Directs before E3. Man, what a time to be a Nintendo fan.

An NX Direct isn't that sudden after a month / month and a half after the last.
 
At the very least, A72 processor does support 4K videos. Wouldn't be able to handle games, but video. But Nintendo doesn't have that kind of service on their systems to watch Blu-ray movies or video files.

They could put that power to other uses though.

Just rambling cause I dunno much else to do atm.
 
10k said:
You've ruined this for me. :(
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D:

if anything, I am there with you with the NEX name. It would be so cool :D.

But after, Gamecube, Wii and Wii U. Nintendo Extra (Life) doesn't sound so farfetched, haha. But it still sounds kind of bad.

Nintendo Ekusu (Dairantou Nintendo Bros. Ekusu)
 
The "NEX" thing sounds like total bullshit. He says it's in reference to it being the 10th Nintendo Console (it's not) and it's based on the codename which even the President of Nintendo himself said is meaningless. Also a game developer would not know the final name yet.
 
Nanashrew said:
At the very least, A72 processor does support 4K videos. Wouldn't be able to handle games, but video. But Nintendo doesn't have that kind of service on their systems to watch Blu-ray movies or video files.

They could put that power to other uses though.

Just rambling cause I dunno much else to do atm.
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Maybe not Blu-Ray, but perhaps it's for services such as Netflix in 4K.
 
Nanashrew said:
Would be nice.

Biggest thing I want is better multitasking and a Twitch app that will allowing me to stream games from the NX like Xbox One and PS4 have.
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I wonder if Nintendo will (ever) do anything like Playstation Live or whatever its called.
Would be awesome to stream or archive videos onto miiverse 2.0 or something haha.
 
-Horizon- said:
I wonder if Nintendo will (ever) do anything like Playstation Live or whatever its called.
Would be awesome to stream or archive videos onto miiverse 2.0 or something haha.
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They seem to have dabbled with YouTube a bit at least with Mario Kart 8 and Smash 4. They just need to expand that functionality, and make it so it's not a game by game basis.
 
AzaK said:
Well it doesn't mean it will do 60fps, high quality 4k. It just needs to output it which wouldn't surprise me.


I talk to him reasonably frequently but he's not coming back as far as I've heard.
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Yeah, I talked to him some time ago about coming back. He has real life stuff to deal with, though, so I have doubts that he ever will.
 
ZOONAMI said:
I don't see how. Would make it more expensive for publishers as well.
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if you think of them as catering japanese support first and foremost to solidify a base, then that doesn't matter. japan's been supporting handhelds strongly for a decade now, and the top platforms have only had cards for the last couple of years there.
 
Thraktor said:
I don't know how anybody would expect an NX home console released this year to have any more than 30% or so more CPU performance than PS4/XBO, let alone getting anywhere near a 125W desktop CPU.

Let's run through the different options Nintendo have open to them for a CPU for a home console releasing this year:

- x86 ISA -

Advantages:
- Large ecosystem of software, compilers, etc., etc.
- Several options which hit performance required for home console

Disadvantages:
- Only two vendors. If they want to create an NX successor with binary BC then Intel and AMD are their only options (unless VIA suddenly starts competing on performance)
- No options which hit energy efficiency required for handheld, which means using two different ISAs for the two devices, which means added cost in tools/OS/etc. development
- No binary-level BC with Wii U

Intel x86 cores:

Advantages:
- Higher end cores hit performance required for home console

Disadvantages:
- Likely more expensive than any other option
- No options which hit energy efficiency required for handheld

Synthesizable: No
Can be fabbed on-die with the GPU: No (unless they're crazy enough to use Intel IGP for a game console)

Broadwell, Skylake, etc.

Advantages:
- Probably the highest per-thread performance within a console CPU TDP
- Could be fabbed on 14nm for a 2016 launch

Disadvantages:
- Expensive
- Large die area
- See general Intel and x86 disadvantages above

Airmont (Atom)

Advantages:
- Small die area
- Low power consumption

Disadvantages:
- Lower performance per clock than either Puma or A72

AMD x86 cores:

Advantages:
- Plausible cores at least match performance required for home console (as they're already used in PS4/XBO)
- Should be cheaper than comparable Intel cores
- Nintendo have a longstanding relationship with AMD

Disadvantages:
- No options which hit energy efficiency required for handheld

Synthesizable: No
Can be fabbed on-die with the GPU: Yes (but only AMD GPUs)

Puma

Advantages:
- Would slightly outperform Jaguar cores used in PS4 and XBO
- AMD have ample expertise with Puma-based APUs
- Relatively small die area

Disadvantages:
- AMD aren't developing any x86 follow-ups to Puma, making the design of NX2 more difficult
- Likely lower performance than ARM A72 (which is one of the reasons AMD has dropped future development in favour of custom ARM cores)

Excavator

Advantages:
- Better performance per thread than Puma at high TDPs

Disadvantages:
- Power consumption required to get that performance is far, far beyond what's feasible in a console
- Large die area
- Even given the power consumption, performance per thread isn't that good

Zen

Advantages:
- Substantially better performance per thread than Puma
- Should provide high performance per thread even at console-level TDP

Disadvantages:
- Only available on 14nm, which means it's unlikely to be feasible for a 2016 console
- Probably a relatively large die area

- ARMv8 ISA -

Advantages:
- Large ecosystem of software, compilers, etc., etc.
- Several options which hit performance required for home console
- Several options which hit efficiency required for handheld
- Nintendo have a long history of ARM-based devices
- A large number of vendors developing binary-compatible cores across the performance spectrum

Disadvantages:
- Of the available cores, none quite hit the performance of high-end x86 or Power ISA cores
- No binary-level BC with Wii U

ARM in-house cores:

Advantages:
- Can be synthesised on-die with pretty much any GPU architecture
- Higher-end cores hit performance required for home console
- AMD have shown they're happy to work with reference ARM designs
- Relatively cheap
- Nintendo have already designed several SoCs with ARM's in-house cores

Disadvantages:
- No options which quite hit per-thread performance of Skylake/Zen

Synthesizable: Yes
Can be fabbed on-die with the GPU: Yes

A72

Advantages:
- Should moderately exceed performance of Jaguar on 28nm
- Relatively small die area
- See general ARM advantages above

Disadvantages:
- Not quite the per-thread performance of Skylake/Zen

A53

Advantages:
- Very energy efficient
- Tiny die area
- Could use exactly the same core on the handheld

Disadvantages:
- Doesn't have the per-thread performance necessary for a home console

AMD ARM cores:

K12

Advantages:
- Should exceed performance of Jaguar by a significant margin
- Nintendo have a longstanding relationship with AMD

Disadvantages:
- Won't be ready until 2017

Synthesizable: No
Can be fabbed on-die with the GPU: Yes (but only AMD GPUs)

Nvidia ARM cores:

Denver

Advantages:
- Probably exceeds the performance of Jaguar
- Could be integrated in a single die with Nvidia's GPU architecture

Disadvantages:
- Inconsistent benchmarks point to potential issues with dynamic recompilation to internal instruction set
- Nintendo may not have the best relationship with Nvidia, as the 3DS was apparently initially due to use a Tegra SoC, which was then dropped in favour of a custom chip with Pica graphics

Synthesizable: No
Can be fabbed on-die with the GPU: Yes (but only Nvidia GPUs)

Other ARM cores (Qualcomm, Samsung, etc.)

Advantages:
- Some offer performance exceeding ARM reference designs
- Some can be fabbed with synthesizable GPUs (eg Mali, PowerVR, etc.) on the same die

Disadvantages:
- Can't be fabbed on-die with AMD or Nvidia desktop-class GPUs

Synthesizable: No (in general)
Can be fabbed on-die with the GPU: Yes

- Power ISA -

Advantages:
- Nintendo have ample experience with Power ISA
- Could provide binary-level BC with Wii U
- Cores are available which hit performance required for home console (and then some!)

Disadvantages
- No options which hit energy efficiency required for handheld
- Only one vendor actively working on Power cores, and they're not exactly the kind of mid-range cores you'd use in a games console
- No options to fab on the same die as GPU

IBM Power cores:

Advantages:
- Nintendo have a long history of working with IBM
- IBM have been putting out chips on 22nm for a while now

Disadvantages:
- See general Power ISA disadvantages above

Synthesizable: No
Can be fabbed on-die with the GPU: No

POWER8

Advantages:
- Massively exceeds performance required for home console

Disadvantages:
- Enormous die area, far too large for a console CPU
- Very high TPD, far too high for a console CPU
- Lot of redundant functionality that's a waste for a console CPU

PowerPC A2

Advantages:
- Should hit performance levels required for a home console
- Relatively small die area
- Relatively power efficient (particularly on 22nm)
- Lots of floating point/SIMD performance

Disadvantages:
- Excessive floating point performance (game consoles don't need an exclusively 64-bit FP pipeline)
- Probably not that great in non-floating point tasks
- While it could technically provide BC with Wii U code, it's a very different architecture to Espresso, so unlikely to be able to run Wii U code at full speed

PowerPC 750

Advantages:
- Same architecture as used in Wii U, so easy and reliable BC
- Small die area
- Relatively energy efficient

Disadvantages:
- A 32-bit core, so system RAM would be limited to 4GB
- Doesn't hit performance levels of Jaguar
- No successors in development, so just pushing the can down the road

- MIPS ISA -

Advantages:
- Em, easier N64 BC perhaps?

Disadvantages:
- More than are worth going into here

Now, I could go further down along the list into obscure ISAs like RISC-V, but we've more than covered every realistic option open to Nintendo.

Based on the above, I think it's safe to rule out all Power ISA cores, as Wii U binary-compatibility can't be worth than much to Nintendo. I think we can also rule out Intel's offerings as well, both due to cost of the chips themselves, and the inability to fab on a single die with the GPU. Similarly I'd rule out all non-reference ARM cores, as they're the only ones which could be included on an SoC with an AMD GPU (which has to be by far the most likely GPU option). Then Excavator can be ruled out for heat and die area, the same reasons Sony and MS ruled out its predecessors, and 14nm is very unlikely to feasible this year, ruling out Zen.

So, we (or more accurately Nintendo) are basically reduced to two options: Puma or A72. Judging by single-core Geekbench 3 32 bit benchmarks (which are unfortunately all I have to work with for both, even enough it will be affected by things like memory configurations), Puma provides about 10% performance per clock boost over Jaguar, and should be able to clock a bit higher in the same thermal envelope (although it's hard to say by how much). At 2GHz, you could expect about a 25% boost over XBO's CPU, for the same number of cores.

The A72 hits 45% higher single-core Geekbench score per clock than Jaguar, and should clock a bit higher as well (they're hitting 1.8GHz in 28nm phone SoCs, so in a console environment we could assume 2GHz at least). A 2GHz 8 core A72 with two cores reserved for the OS would then give developers about 40% more to work with than they have on XBO. (Again this is just on the basis of this one benchmark).

If Nintendo want more performance than that (and given their history, I would be very surprised if they did), then more cores would be pretty much their only answer, although such a route isn't without its difficulties, as developers may struggle to adequately parallelise their code to make proper use of such a CPU.
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This is one impressive post! Im in awe.
 
Guys I'm a dev working for a large publisher.

I can confirm the following:

486SX CPU clocked at 500MHz
128MB of ED-RAM
Compatible with Floppy discs and Zip drives. Also has a proprietary format called a Small-Disk which can hold 200MB of data! It's a bit like a vinyl but like not really the same.

And finally the killer detail, it will launch with the entire GBA collection ported. That's right! ALL OF IT!
 
neurosisxeno said:
Unlikely. Companies like Nintendo get Blu-Ray Disc's for a few cents a pop from OEM's, compared to having to pay a few dollars a pop for 64GB Flash Sticks.
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Blu-Ray knock-offs, yes. As for cartridges, there are definitely other benefits (faster load times, fewer moving parts in the NX Console, potential physical cross-play with the NX Handheld if they go the shared platform route, etc.).
 
Oblivion said:
This is pretty huge, isn't it? Aside from being a first for Nintendo, this theoreticallly should make ports easier, no?
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x86 would not significantly aid in porting. That myth comes from outdated thinking which has managed to persist well past its expiration date.

Also, I generally don't put much stock into the rumor in the OP. The really interesting stuff was from LCGeek in this thread, who said that the CPU was noticeably more powerful than PS4 or Xbone, but not by a huge margin.

neurosisxeno said:
Unlikely. Companies like Nintendo get Blu-Ray Disc's for a few cents a pop from OEM's, compared to having to pay a few dollars a pop for 64GB Flash Sticks.
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Nintendo doesn't actually use blu-rays though. They use custom discs which are pretty similar to blu-rays. Carts also definitely would make the system itself cheaper, since an optical drive is much more expensive than a cart slot.
 
Neoxon said:
Blu-Ray knock-offs, yes. As for cartridges, there are definitely other benefits (faster load times, fewer moving parts in the NX Console, potential physical cross-play with the NX Handheld if they go the shared platform route, etc.).
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Well that's what I meant. They are "not Blu-Ray" Blu-Ray's. Essentially use the exact same tech, are manufactured the exact same way, just doesn't require a licensing agreement with Sony, and can't play Blu-Ray movies. And while there are benefits, storage media is absolutely the last place I expect Nintendo to make a smart decision--N64 Carts, Mini-DVD, No DVD-Player in the Wii, Knock-off Blu-Ray in the Wii U. Nintendo is Sony Vita levels of bad when it comes to picking a storage medium.
 
I think it's the idea of having their handheld and home console on cartridges to mitigate cost because it would just be one format across two systems. Also no need for an optical drive in their home console which could also reduce cost too. Japan has also been on cartridges forever now with handhelds.

Cartridges have gotten better than they were in the past.

Terrell had a long detailed post and stuff on that in another thread but I don't remember where.
 
neurosisxeno said:
Well that's what I meant. They are "not Blu-Ray" Blu-Ray's. Essentially use the exact same tech, are manufactured the exact same way, just doesn't require a licensing agreement with Sony, and can't play Blu-Ray movies. And while there are benefits, storage media is absolutely the last place I expect Nintendo to make a smart decision--N64 Carts, Mini-DVD, No DVD-Player in the Wii, Knock-off Blu-Ray in the Wii U. Nintendo is Sony Vita levels of bad when it comes to picking a storage medium.
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If those are your examples, you're not really proving your point...the only mistakes in storage medium were with the N64 (even though carts had numerous advantages) and the GC. DVDs were fine, and were also used by the 360. Blurays are the largest format being used so the Wii U is fine as well. Lastly the 3DS using cards worked out just fine as well. An optical drive in a portable is a terrible idea (see the PSP and UMDs)
 
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