• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

The Curious Case of the Switch Foxconn Leak (Now a hardware fanfiction thread)

Theonik

Theonik

Member
The Boat said:
I don't mean you can know by looking, just that someone in there has to know what they're making and working with.
Click to expand...
They don't. They just assemble parts that Nintendo provides them with. The chip will come prepackaged with a Nintendo part number and that's it. The author did say part was speculation. Clocks might just be a stretch in case he's got access to some engineering screens to test parts during the assembly process.
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
Hoo-doo said:
The proof is in the pudding. Everyone got to see how games running on Switch looked and played. There's very little reason to go down this road again.

Some people just can't help themselves and will just extrapolate from any tidbit of information endlessly until it fits the narrative they have in their head.

So no, I personally don't think the leak is accurate. We've seen this song and dance a million times before.
Click to expand...

Nothing about any game release really tells us about the cpu and gpu to this extent. In all honesty, the 20% on gpu would likely go unnoticed either way.

That said, I'd still say the eg leak is almost certainly real, but at least most of this was as well. We don't have a solid time line on when both bits of information came from, and we simply don't know all of the facts... So yeah, speculation all day erry day.

I suspect even if the higher specs are all true, it'll play very little real factor regardless.
 
K

Kysen

Member
This is "X1 hidden dgpu" levels of reaching. The games themselves bear credibility to DFs leaks. Why would a pascal GPU be struggling with 1080p?
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
Kysen said:
This is "X1 hidden dgpu" levels of reaching. The games themselves bear credibility to DFs leaks. Why would a pascal GPU be struggling with 1080p?
Click to expand...

Because it'd still be a portable variant with lower TF than both consoles that often struggle with 1080p :p

Again, even if this leak were true, it would still put the switch well below the xb1 gpu.
 
Z

z0m3le

Banned
nynt9 said:
Well, first of all, "this rumor wasn all true if you ignore the parts where it wasn't" isn't convincing to begin with. Secondly, getting visually identifiable characteristics (controller color, button names) correct is different from getting specs (CPU clock) correct. They require a different level of involvement with the product. Considering they've gotten other non visually identifiable things about the system wrong, I'd err on the side of caution for this rumor.
Click to expand...

It's interesting to point out that Tegra X1 works on 76.8mhz increments, so 768mhz is x10 and 921mhz is x12. Pretty lucky guess to pull that number out of thin air IMO.

Also CPU clock of quad A57 20nm @1ghz draws the same power consumption as A72 16nm @ 1.7ghz pretty interesting to say the least.

He said he saw the clocks during the demo iirc, and a lot of the times demos when debugging show the clocks of the GPU and CPU cores. He also confirmed the 1600mhz RAM speed that Eurogamer said as well.

To me it looks like the spring launch allowed for a late audible to 16nm. They are only making 2m for launch, I imagine some off the shelf design could easily be massed produced 2 years after it hit market originally.
 
S

SpookyBlackFish

Member
Kysen said:
This is "X1 hidden dgpu" levels of reaching. The games themselves bear credibility to DFs leaks. Why would a pascal GPU be struggling with 1080p?
Click to expand...

Whatever it is, no one knows how strongly customised the chips in the Switch are. There could be some Pascal stuff in there, but maybe just for the sake of saving space or saving energy. It could be customised so heavily, that it struggles with 1080p despite being based on current gen chips.
 
K

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
Lexxus said:
I still believe what they reported is just the Dev kit and not the final specs on the device. I just hope so.
Click to expand...

What Eurogamer reported is what Nintendo communicated to the devs as the target clocks. That is what the devs will work with and optimise the games around, no matter of the devkit.
 
C

Clefargle

Member
z0m3le said:
It's interesting to point out that Tegra X1 works on 76.8mhz increments, so 768mhz is x10 and 921mhz is x12. Pretty lucky guess to pull that number out of thin air IMO.

Also CPU clock of quad A57 20nm @1ghz draws the same power consumption as A72 16nm @ 1.7ghz pretty interesting to say the least.

He said he saw the clocks during the demo iirc, and a lot of the times demos when debugging show the clocks of the GPU and CPU cores. He also confirmed the 1600mhz RAM speed that Eurogamer said as well.

To me it looks like the spring launch allowed for a late audible to 16nm. They are only making 2m for launch, I imagine some off the shelf design could easily be massed produced 2 years after it hit market originally.
Click to expand...

Neat to see that the numbers work out so nicely. This is legit interesting and I would enjoy really enjoy owning a machine with the latter specs. But I'm not gonna hang my hat on it.
 
LordOfChaos

LordOfChaos

Member
dampflokfreund said:
If it has A72 Cores and Pascal, the price point is valid. But with the current state of A53s and Maxwell it is not, so I will be waiting for confirmation.
Click to expand...


16nm FF with the leaks specs would go a long way for me too. Thought it would be a shame to be on a leaky 20nm fab that has to have lower clocks to avoid power getting out of hand. 16nm FF fixed all that and allowed higher clocks at lower power. Cortex A72 has also obviously already been taped out on 16nm, but not 20nm.
 
K

Kilrogg

paid requisite penance
SpookyBlackFish said:
I'd need to see this live in action but still, I think arena fighting games (with comic style) as well as most good looking racing games are no good examples for overall performance of a console. This is why I was never very much impressed by this one racing game early in WiiU's lifecycle where devs "went the extra mile" and, sorry for that because the programmers are immensely talented wizards nevertheless, Fast Racing Neo.

That said, ARMS looks nice and clean.
Click to expand...

ARMS is indeed really clean with eye-popping colors. I don't know if it's 900p, but it looked 1080p to me when I saw it at the demo event. At least, it's sharp enough to pass for a 1080p game. Maybe some kind of AA going on?

At any rate, no matter how good the developers, even Nintendo, I doubt you would get the game to be this clean, textures and all, at this resolution in splitscreen at 60fps. It definitely felt like a game made for the Switch from the ground up. I was seriously impressed by how "CG-like" it looked, and I don't think this is only due to art direction. It felt technically solid.

Then again, this is the MK8 team we're talking about. MK8's beauty borders on witchcraft.
 
Z

z0m3le

Banned
KojiKnight said:
Nothing about any game release really tells us about the cpu and gpu to this extent. In all honesty, the 20% on gpu would likely go unnoticed either way.

That said, I'd still say the eg leak is almost certainly real, but at least most of this was as well. We don't have a solid time line on when both bits of information came from, and we simply don't know all of the facts... So yeah, speculation all day erry day.

I suspect even if the higher specs are all true, it'll play very little real factor regardless.
Click to expand...

We do know that the foxconn leak must have happened after full production as the production details were made in the leak of 20k a day, so sometime after mid October, while Eurogamer's leaked clocks were in their own words 'a few months old' when they released them in November.
 
Theonik

Theonik

Member
z0m3le said:
It's interesting to point out that Tegra X1 works on 76.8mhz increments, so 768mhz is x10 and 921mhz is x12. Pretty lucky guess to pull that number out of thin air IMO.

Also CPU clock of quad A57 20nm @1ghz draws the same power consumption as A72 16nm @ 1.7ghz pretty interesting to say the least.

He said he saw the clocks during the demo iirc, and a lot of the times demos when debugging show the clocks of the GPU and CPU cores. He also confirmed the 1600mhz RAM speed that Eurogamer said as well.

To me it looks like the spring launch allowed for a late audible to 16nm. They are only making 2m for launch, I imagine some off the shelf design could easily be massed produced 2 years after it hit market originally.
Click to expand...
This sounds a bit more credible still a lot if speculation on his part but I don't think he's lying. We don't have sufficient information at the moment to come to any conclusion.
 
N

Narroo

Member
plagiarize said:
I wouldn't call Steep or Skyrim 'cross gen' either. I get the argument you can make that the Switch represents the start of a new generation, but not based on it's architecture or power. It's current gen. It's closer to Xbox One and PS4 than the Wii U was. We didn't see Xbox One / PS4 titles ported to Wii U in its first year (heck, have we ever?), I don't think. Everything was based on the 360 versions from what I can remember.
Click to expand...

Skyrim is a PS3/360 game. How is this not a cross-gen port?
 
A

aeolist

Banned
it'll be interesting to know for sure just because launching with a 20nm SoC might mean we could see a 16/14nm shrink down the line
 
Z

z0m3le

Banned
aeolist said:
it'll be interesting to know for sure just because launching with a 20nm SoC might mean we could see a 16/14nm shrink down the line
Click to expand...

Yes, the alternative is a quick price drop, but 10nm is produced this year and might be available next year for Switch, so I think the price drop works in their favor there too.
 
1

10k

Banned
Inuhanyou said:
That tag...
Click to expand...

ElTorro said:
Again, that was just pure speculation on the leaker's side. All he can reasonably claim to know is: (1) that the chip uses the ARMv8 ISA which is true for A57 and A73; (2) that the chips can run at the given clock speeds; and (3) the size of the chip.

The clock speeds are consistent with the configured speeds you would see for a Maxwell-based Tegra X1 derivative. They neither are evidence for nor against Pascal. Moreover, they are likely just the maximum clock speeds the chip can achieve for a short period of time before throttling kicks in.
Click to expand...
Don't kill my hype.
 
B

BitStyle

Unconfirmed Member
Would be interesting if true. I wouldn't put much stock in pointing to BoTW as reason against, especially when launch games at most console launches are generally low-balled compared to full system specs (720p New Super Mario Bros U for example).

Time will tell I suppose. Will we be able to confirm the innards when the Switch releases and people get under the hood?
 
P

plagiarize

Banned
KojiKnight said:
.... Which was an enhanced port of the ps360/pc version.
Click to expand...

So? There was a 360 codebase to base this on, and they didn't go with that one.

The point remains that the Wii U's ports were all based on the 360 / PS3 versions, and the Switch's appear to be based on the Xbox One / PS4 versions (though we don't know about FIFA yet).

Am I forgetting a Wii U port based on the Xbox One version of something?
 
L

Lalalandia

Member
BitStyle said:
Would be interesting if true. I wouldn't put much stock in pointing to BoTW as reason against, especially when launch games at most console launches are generally low-balled compared to full system specs (720p New Super Mario Bros U for example).

Time will tell I suppose. Will we be able to confirm the innards when the Switch releases and people get under the hood?
Click to expand...

Yes we should see the usual folk do a teardown and if we're really lucky someone will lap the cpu and throw it under a SEM (although some folks have had great results with a razor and high-end DSLRs).
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
BitStyle said:
Would be interesting if true. I wouldn't put much stock in pointing to BoTW as reason against, especially when launch games at most console launches are generally low-balled compared to full system specs (720p New Super Mario Bros U for example).

Time will tell I suppose. Will we be able to confirm the innards when the Switch releases and people get under the hood?
Click to expand...

On the SoC? No. We'd need technical documents leaked or for someone to decap and scan the chip with an electron microscope, and even that wouldn't tell us clock rates.
 
K

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
z0m3le said:
He's from directfeedgaming and goes by Natedrake on gaf. He had insider info on Switch.
Click to expand...

What has this insider leaked and proved to be true until now?

raw
Click to expand...
 
M

Mokujin

Member
Kysen said:
This is "X1 hidden dgpu" levels of reaching. The games themselves bear credibility to DFs leaks. Why would a pascal GPU be struggling with 1080p?
Click to expand...

Please stop referencing Pascal as it is some kind of magic technology, a same core count, same clock Pascal gpu would struggle almost the same as a Maxwell one.

My stance is that clocks speculation at this point are basically worthless since E.G. has infinite more credibility, but it annoys me how much the Pascal mantra is mentioned wrongly.
 
B

bomblord1

Banned
Mokujin said:
Please stop referencing Pascal as it is some kind of magic technology, a same core count, same clock Pascal gpu would struggle almost the same as a Maxwell one.

My stance is that clocks speculation at this point are basically worthless since E.G. has infinite more credibility, but it annoys me how much the Pascal mantra is mentioned wrongly.
Click to expand...

Yea just being on Pascal would (best case scenario) only give it about 50% more performance at the same clock. Which is far from some magic secret sauce. Would take it from 150gflops to 225 in handheld mode.
 
T

Thraktor

Member
While the 4310 mAh battery and neon joy-cons are too precise to be a guess, I would still err on the side of believing Eurogamer when it comes to clock speeds. Eurogamer has a good track records with prior hardware leaks and has a reliable way of finding them out (by talking to devs). There's no reason to believe that a Foxconn employee would have any information about clock speeds, fabrication processes or microarchitectures. They're simply shipped a finished SoC by Nintendo and assemble it together with everything else. They probably do some testing of the units once assembled, but I don't imagine it tells them these kinds of specifics.

That said, A72s or A73s would be nice :p

Edit: Also, as mentioned above by ElTorro, even if the clock speeds are accurate, that doesn't actually mean they'll be used in games, just that they chip can theoretically hit those speeds. Particularly with the CPU clock, which sounds unreasonably high even for A73 cores at 16nm. Nintendo may push the CPU up to higher clocks in specific scenarios (e.g. for Gamecube/Wii emulation) while retaining the 1GHz limit for games.
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
bomblord1 said:
Yea just being on Pascal would (best case scenario) only give it about 50% more performance at the same clock. Which is far from some magic secret sauce. Would take it from 150gflops to 225 in handheld mode.
Click to expand...

I don't believe this is true. Maxwell and Pascal perform similarly per clock. The benefit is that Pascal is way more energy efficient so you could get higher clocks per watt.

Clock rates are quite important for this discussion.
 
T

The Boat

Member
Theonik said:
They don't. They just assemble parts that Nintendo provides them with. The chip will come prepackaged with a Nintendo part number and that's it. The author did say part was speculation. Clocks might just be a stretch in case he's got access to some engineering screens to test parts during the assembly process.
Click to expand...
Fair enough!
 
B

bomblord1

Banned
KojiKnight said:
I don't believe this is true. Maxwell and Pascal perform similarly per clock. The benefit is that Pascal is way more energy efficient so you could get higher clocks per watt.

Clock rates are quite important for this discussion.
Click to expand...

Everything I've seen about Pascal says that at its default 1ghz clock it gets 750gflops vs the X1 500Gflops. Which is a 50% performance improvement. Is that wrong?
 
M

Mokujin

Member
bomblord1 said:
Yea just being on Pascal would (best case scenario) only give it about 50% more performance at the same clock. Which is far from some magic secret sauce. Would take it from 150gflops to 225 in handheld mode.
Click to expand...

Not really, at the same clock / same core count, there would be marginal single digit % gains due some slight architecture gains, I don't remember who did the testing right now, will look for it later.

bomblord1 said:
Everything I've seen about Pascal says that at its default 1ghz clock it gets 750gflops vs the X1 500Gflops. Which is a 50% performance improvement. Is that wrong?
Click to expand...

Pascal chips thanks to 16nm finfet usually can clock about 50% faster, that's where gains come from, but we know the clocks already...
 
L

lwilliams3

Member
I didn't know the Switch had a big battery like this prior to this discussion. That's very unexpected to me.

Thraktor said:
While the 4310 mAh battery and neon joy-cons are too precise to be a guess, I would still err on the side of believing Eurogamer when it comes to clock speeds. Eurogamer has a good track records with prior hardware leaks and has a reliable way of finding them out (by talking to devs). There's no reason to believe that a Foxconn employee would have any information about clock speeds, fabrication processes or microarchitectures. They're simply shipped a finished SoC by Nintendo and assemble it together with everything else. They probably do some testing of the units once assembled, but I don't imagine it tells them these kinds of specifics.

That said, A72s or A73s would be nice :p
Click to expand...


Thanks for your reply. I originally missed your post about the battery in the other thread (I figured it that most would be too emotional to be rational), so I decided to post it important here too. :)

Thraktor said:
So come into this thread I read the OP, see the 3 hours charge time, think "that's pretty reasonable", and see that they're using a 4310 mAh battery, which is on the top end of what I would have expected. Good stuff.

And then I start reading the replies... holy hell. I know neogaf has a reputation for over-reacting to things, but this thread is just straight up nuts. Go outside, take a walk, have a breath of fresh air, and when you've calmed down you can come back and we can actually look at the facts.

You're back? Great, nice day outside, isn't it? Okay, now let's talk batteries.

Battery Size

At 4310 mAh, Switch has by far the highest-capacity battery of any gaming device ever made. Here's what's currently out there:

3DS / 2DS - 1300 mAh
New 3DS - 1400 mAh
(New) 3DS XL - 1750 mAh
PS Vita - 2200 mAh

That's about twice the capacity of PS Vita or almost three and a half times the capacity of the 3DS or 2DS.

Now, you're surely saying "but X phone or Y tablet has such-and-such a capacity, Nintendo must be able to fit more in there!", but I'm willing to be X phone and Y tablet aren't actively cooled. A typical phone or tablet these days is basically a battery with some electronics and a screen attached. For a phone the battery could account for 60-70% of the internal volume, and it can be even higher for tablets.

Nintendo doesn't have the luxury of dedicating so much internal space to batteries, because it has to fit a fan and heatsink in there, which likely occupies as much as half the space between the screen and the rear of the case. Have a look at this rear-view photo of the Switch:



The blue box I've included is pretty much the best-case-scenario for how much space Nintendo can allocate to the battery in Switch. If you look at the fan vents at the top and bottom of the unit you can see where the heatsink and fan are going to sit (and I've been pretty conservative with the red box for this, as I'm not even including the area around the third vent to the lower right). Then on the left we've got space taken up by the game card slot, microSD slot, kickstand, and likely part of the logic board (which will overlap the cooling system).

There's no space for a bigger battery. The reason I say 4310 mAh is at the top end of what I would have expected is because there's just nowhere to put anything bigger. A 4310 mAh battery is basically Nintendo squeezing as big a battery as they possibly can in there. Quote me on this, when we see teardowns in March there isn't going to be some big gap where they could have put a bigger battery. They've squeezed in as much as they can without increasing the physical size of the device.

Charging

Regarding the "Switch doesn't do quick charging" claim, let's first do some basic maths. A 4310 mAh battery, assuming a standard 3.7V, comes to 15.95 Wh. For that battery to charge from 0 to 100% in 3 hours, then at an absolute minimum, it would have to be charging at a rate of 15.95/3 = 5.3W. Standard USB 2 provides 2.5W of power, so it's physically impossible for Switch to charge so quickly without some form of "quick charging".

However, as several people have already pointed out, batteries don't charge at a flat rate from 0 to 100%, they charge more quickly for the first ~80%, and much more slowly for the final ~20%. It's quite likely that Switch's peak charging rate is anywhere from 10-15W, which is, once again, far more than a standard USB 2 charger would provide.

Finally, we have Nintendo's FCC listing for Switch last month, which gave us these little nuggets of information:



See that bit where it says that the (USB-C) AC adaptor can output DC at 15V? That, folks, means that the system uses USB Power Delivery Revision 2.0 Version 1.2 or later. Or, in layman's terms, quick charging.

So, unless Nintendo have broken both the laws of thermodynamics and some regular human laws by lying to the FCC (although I'd imagine they'd get into more trouble over the former), Switch is most definitely capable of quick charging by any definition.

Regarding the total charging time of 3 hours, this is pretty typical for a gaming device. The 3DS takes even longer at 3 and a half hours for a full charge, while the PS Vita takes 2 hours and 40 mins. And in both cases we're talking about far smaller batteries than Switch has.

People also need to keep in mind once again that li-ion batteries are much slower to charge for the last 20% or so. This is why phone manufacturers always give specs like "charges to 80% in an hour", and leave out the fact that the remaining 20% takes another hour. Anantech provides some useful charging graphs in their smartphone reviews (e.g. OnePlus 3T, Honor 8), and if you look through them you'll notice a trend that charging to 80% typically takes only half the time of charging fully to 100%. This is going to vary a little bit depending on the battery and charging tech used, but it's usually around that ratio.

Translating to Switch, what we're probably looking at is the device charging to 80% battery in 90 minutes or so. Which, for me at least, is pretty reasonable. Yeah, they probably could have got it down to 60 minutes by using a more expensive battery, more expensive power ICs and a more expensive charger, but I doubt I'll ever be in a situation where that's the difference between my Switch having a usable amount of charge or not.

TL:DR

- Switch's battery is far bigger than any other gaming device
- Switch's battery is as big as they could possibly fit in there given the active cooling
- Switch definitely uses quick charging (source: FCC & James Clerk Maxwell)
- Switch probably charges to ~80% battery in about 90 minutes
Click to expand...
 
C

calc84maniac

Member
bomblord1 said:
Yea just being on Pascal would (best case scenario) only give it about 50% more performance at the same clock. Which is far from some magic secret sauce. Would take it from 150gflops to 225 in handheld mode.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I think you mean 60℅ less energy usage at the same clocks. Or 40℅ higher clocks at the same energy usage.

If they were using Pascal I guarantee they would use it to improve the low end of the battery life range rather than opting for more power.
 
S

Skittzo0413

Member
Hoo-doo said:
The proof is in the pudding. Everyone got to see how games running on Switch looked and played. There's very little reason to go down this road again.

Some people just can't help themselves and will just extrapolate from any tidbit of information endlessly until it fits the narrative they have in their head.

So no, I personally don't think the leak is accurate. We've seen this song and dance a million times before.
Click to expand...

As many people have said in this thread, this wouldn't really change much if true. It's a ~20% boost in GPU power, though a much improved CPU. That's not the type of thing we would notice by looking at games.

z0m3le said:
It's interesting to point out that Tegra X1 works on 76.8mhz increments, so 768mhz is x10 and 921mhz is x12. Pretty lucky guess to pull that number out of thin air IMO.

Also CPU clock of quad A57 20nm @1ghz draws the same power consumption as A72 16nm @ 1.7ghz pretty interesting to say the least.

He said he saw the clocks during the demo iirc, and a lot of the times demos when debugging show the clocks of the GPU and CPU cores. He also confirmed the 1600mhz RAM speed that Eurogamer said as well.

To me it looks like the spring launch allowed for a late audible to 16nm. They are only making 2m for launch, I imagine some off the shelf design could easily be massed produced 2 years after it hit market originally.
Click to expand...

Your speculation is quite intriguing here, but from what I recall the DF clock leak was actually much more recent than the Foxconn leak, so I'm unsure how you could reconcile that. And the clocks weren't stated to be simply "devkit" clocks, it was stated to be the final clock speed available for applications. It could still be possible to have A72/73s at 1GHz but I'm not sure what the point of that would be.

It's very interesting speculation regardless!

z0m3le said:
They are over 4 months old at this point, as they admitted themselves.
Click to expand...

I don't think this was in that article, did you get this from somewhere else?
 
L

LordOcidax

Member
Wow thats leak was on spot. Eurogamers need to respond.
*output; * 1x USB3.0, 1x hdmi, on the side 2xUSB2.0 on the dock
*There's 2 shoulder button on each joy-con, they are called SL, SR *It's very complex inside.
*while playing *Battery 4310mA,
 
B

bomblord1

Banned
Mokujin said:
Not really, at the same clock / same core count, there would be marginal single digit % gains due some slight architecture gains, I don't remember who did the testing right now, will look for it later.



Pascal chips thanks to 16nm finfet usually can clock about 50% faster, that's where gains come from, but we know the clocks already...
Click to expand...

Thanks so even if it was Pascal it would just use less energy with no performance improvements since the clocks are set in stone.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Nintendo Switch 2 Discussion Thread
2 3
146
9K
Celcius replied
Leak: Switch 2 to use Orin T239 Nvidia Soc , PS4 and PS4 pro performance Without DLSS
8 9 10 11 12
582
51K
zeldaring replied
Best thing about the Switch is... Switching!
Opinion
43
2K
mopspear replied
Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has denied it briefed developers on plans for a Switch successor this summer, calling media reports “untrue
News
8
804
yurinka replied
[IGN] Seriously, Nintendo, It’s Time to Release a Switch Pro
2 3 4 5 6
296
18K
Knightime_X replied
Top Bottom