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A Nintendo Switch has been taken apart

Thraktor

Member
He says Displayport over USB C, he's undoubtedly talking about the USB-C dock data connection it would seem?

Yeah, I would assume so, but he says internal bus and refers to 3DS's 128Mb/s, which is quite confusing. I only brought it up as it occurred to me that the maths lined up (when I'd heard it first I had forgotten about the encoding overhead).
 

jts

...hate me...
I think it would be a good portable, as a home console it's a disaster and I wish Nintendo would just give up on this hybrid concept
Yeah, I too, wish I couldn't easily plug this amazing console to my TV to overclock it and play its sweet HD games in the comfort of my TV.

Wait, what?
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
I've ordered one of these, which seems to be the best value in terms of capacity vs price. Anything with a ~90MB/s read speed from a reputable manufacturer should be fine, write speeds aren't going to be as important as it'll be doing a lot more reading than writing (and writes will usually be bottlenecked by your broadband connection, anyway).



Faster than regular MicroSDs (~250MB/s vs ~90MB/s), although in theory UHS-II MicroSD cards would match it. I very much doubt Switch supports UHS-II, though, as it's only made its way to high-end cameras at the moment.

This has me thinking to stick with physical games until I know more about how digital games perform on SD cards. I wonder if games can use some internal memory as cache to speed things up after initial loading (like the OG xbox)?
 

Thraktor

Member
This has me thinking to stick with physical games until I know more about how digital games perform on SD cards. I wonder if games can use some internal memory as cache to speed things up after initial loading (like the OG xbox)?

I'd say we'll have loading time comparisons on Zelda between game card, internal memory and MicroSD within a few days after launch, so that should give us an idea of how speeds compare in the real world.
 

lutheran

Member
What's indicated here? We literally just have a picture of the silicon and nothing else, and a bunch of people who are simply trying to match pictures of the back to indicate it's 1:1. It's ridiculous

When I compared the two I myself wasn't knocking the tech, I just think it makes sense that these 2 chips are probably going to be real real similar. I love the Switch already, very neat hardware. And I agree with the person above who said this will also do fine as a home console graphically. The Zelda game alone proves that out and that is not even built from the ground up for the Switch presumably.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
Do we know how many bits it is yet?

Nope. 32 memory traces up top, but the rest could be anywhere in the board layers, they're not on the bottom. 64 or 128 still unknown.

Other than the die size being near the same as the TX1
we-got-nothing.jpeg
 
Nintendo does hardware upgrades mid gen on their handhelds like new 3ds . But they didnt do any home console mid gen upgrade .

False. They just didn't release a whole new console to upgrade their console.

latest


They could do something similar and instead of upgrading the system itself, they could upgrade the docks to have some sort of supplemental computing device.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
I think the switch is going to be a GOAT handheld but people need to stop acting like half-precision actually matters in practice imo.

It does

Majority of what ends up on the GPU could be FP16. Wasn't there a dev on GAF saying that pretty much only vertexes would require FP32 nowadays and that this takes a small part of computational power?

Ubisoft dev here also said the game he's working on could have 70% of the code in FP16.

70% of the code running @ twice the speed is not something we should act like it doesnt matters.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
I'd say we'll have loading time comparisons on Zelda between game card, internal memory and MicroSD within a few days after launch, so that should give us an idea of how speeds compare in the real world.

Hope so. Assuming you can choose SD card for installations. It might force you to use internal storage first. Are there enough launch games to fill that up and force Zelda onto SD card?
 
any idea yet how many sm or whatever on the gpu side? or clock speeds? i remember last week people saying we would be able to tell clock speeds and sm cores by break down pics
 

Doctre81

Member
When Nvidia were talking about how many man hours they put into the custom chip that powers the Switch they worded it perfectly because what they really meant was they put all those man hours into the chip that powers both their own refresh of the Shield and also the Switch.

No. The soc in the new shield and switch are not the same.
 
When I compared the two I myself wasn't knocking the tech, I just think it makes sense that these 2 chips are probably going to be real real similar. I love the Switch already, very neat hardware. And I agree with the person above who said this will also do fine as a home console graphically. The Zelda game alone proves that out and that is not even built from the ground up for the Switch presumably.
Zelda on switch is literally identical to the Wii u version, except better sound and 900p resolution on docked mode. They literally have identical download sizes too. I really doubt that tge switch version of Zelda is even using half of the console's power.
 
Zelda on switch is literally identical to the Wii u version, except better sound and 900p resolution on docked mode. They literally have identical download sizes too. I really doubt that tge switch version of Zelda is even using half of the console's power.

The Switch version uses better textures, better framerate stability, better draw distance, and less pop-in, before better resolution and sound. It's also half a gb larger than the Wii U version.
 

Doctre81

Member
Zelda on switch is literally identical to the Wii u version, except better sound and 900p resolution on docked mode.

Nope. Better draw distance. Different lighting. Higher resolutions textures. Actually some of the textures aren't even the same as the wiiu version.
 
any idea yet how many sm or whatever on the gpu side? or clock speeds? i remember last week people saying we would be able to tell clock speeds and sm cores by break down pics

You can't tell clock speeds by looking at the chip, unless the chip literally says it right on it.

Unless there is a serial code on it that can be matched to some database (which there almost never is for custom chips) it won't do much good. The serials ARE however more useful for things like RAM, of which are almost always off the shelf parts.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
What? No it's far from a disaster. Graphics have plateaued ...

Lol, no. Sorry, but that's just utterly ridiculous. The Switch is an impressive handheld, and I'm getting one (mainly because there's no way I'm not playing BotW), but it is a very weak home console. So if a person is only interested in that aspect of it, it's natural to be disappointed.

Yeah, I too, wish I couldn't easily plug this amazing console to my TV to overclock it and play its sweet HD games in the comfort of my TV.

Wait, what?

Sure, Wii U level games at higher resolutions. Do you really not understand why some people (those looking for Nintendo's next home console, not their next handheld) find that a bit underwhelming in 2017?
 

AzaK

Member
Zelda on switch is literally identical to the Wii u version, except better sound and 900p resolution on docked mode. They literally have identical download sizes too. I really doubt that tge switch version of Zelda is even using half of the console's power.
Then why isn't it 1080 and why does it still drop frames even in 900?

Maybe the memory bandwidth is killing it. It's only 25GB/s right?

Is it possible that the engine for it is basically set to operate with Edram and that's hampering a unified memory system?
 

pooh

Member
Not sure if anyone else has pointed this out, but the re-translated Foxconn leak said this:

"I had a look at the heatsink today, there's a L shaped heat pipe 0.8cm wide and about 12cm long, placed upside down. The fins on it are 5cm long and 0.8cm tall, and there's a turbine fan with 4cm diameter. Looks pretty shoddy, but should be enough since the main unit doesn't generate that much heat anyway."

Now, take a look at the heatsink, fan, and fins:

34zz9Nu.jpg


5wUVOvL.jpg


In addition to everything else the Foxconn leak had correct, I just can't see any way that this observation in particular was a wild guess. I'm now fully convinced that the Foxconn leak was 100% correct, which means we're currently looking at a Pascal chip X1 chip, likely using 4 A72 cores, and will be seeing a more powerful dock for 4K gaming later on.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
Lol, no. Sorry, but that's just utterly ridiculous. The Switch is an impressive handheld, and I'm getting one (mainly because there's no way I'm not playing BotW), but it is a very weak home console. So if a person is only interested in that aspect of it, it's natural to be disappointed.

Then every console is a disapointment with that mentality, even PS4 pro.

There's only so much you can do under 100W, otherwise get a PC.

All those teraflops and the differences are becoming smaller and smaller, especially if you chase resolution. This is no longer PSX vs PS2 or PS2 vs PS3. The lines are blurring.
 

AzaK

Member
Not sure if anyone else has pointed this out, but the re-translated Foxconn leak said this:



Now, take a look at the heatsink, fan, and fins:

34zz9Nu.jpg


5wUVOvL.jpg


In addition to everything else the Foxconn leak had correct, I just can't see any way that this observation in particular was a wild guess. I'm now fully convinced that the Foxconn leak was 100% correct, which means we're currently looking at a Pascal chip X1 chip, likely using 4 A72 cores, and will be seeing a more powerful dock for 4K gaming later on.

Umm we know the cores from the official sdk leak. A57s
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Then every console is a disapointment with that mentality, even PS4 pro.

There's only so much you can do under 100W, otherwise get a PC.

How is that even remotely the same? The Pro has very reasonable performance for a $400 home console released in 2016 (just as the original did in 2013). The Switch has abysmal performance for a $300 home console in 2017, IF that's what you view it as. Viewed as the handheld it really is it's more impressive. But some people don't want a handheld (dockable or not).
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
Not sure if anyone else has pointed this out, but the re-translated Foxconn leak said this:



Now, take a look at the heatsink, fan, and fins:

That's clearly a J and not an L.

Also, would a Chinese refer to a Latin letter to describe shape?
 
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