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Emily Rogers: NX Not Using x86 Architecture - Won't Blow Away Current Gen Consoles

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M

MuchoMalo

Banned
Rodin said:
If what Emily said about Nvidia being involved is true, i think all the pieces of information we have would fit together.

- AMD has 3 wins: 2 x86 and 1 arm, one of them goes beyond gaming. These are PS4 Neo, new Xbox One and an Apple device. Neo and 1.5 technically aren't "new wins", but maybe it's something that they can spin (especially if the revisions use Polaris). It would also explain why they only expect 1.5b revenue from these.

- In late 2014-early 2015 (iirc), Nintendo was looking for Lead Graphic Engineer for Next-Gen Console. Experience with low power architecture was a bonus, and Nvidia GPUs are very power efficient (much more than AMD up to Maxwell vs GCN 1.2, we don't know about Pascal vs Polaris yet).

- LCGeek reported that the Nintendo NX CPU, while far from being a monster, is considerably more powerful than what the Xbox One and PS4 have.

- Emily Rogers said that the CPU isn't x86 and the specs on paper are closer to Xbox One than PS4, and "even that would be a stretch".

- If Nintendo went ARM+Nvidia, the above situation should be pretty clear even in the more pessimistic scenario. A 1tflop Nvidia GPU has lower numbers on paper but it absolutely destroys the Xbox One and comes pretty close to what the PS4 has (a 750ti, which is 1.3tflops, actually beats the PS4 in many situations as per Digital Foundry's tests). But isn't this a bit disappointing? A console that comes out in 2017 isn't considerably better in every way than two consoles that came out in late 2013? The answer should be yes, but there's another thing to consider: as we've seen many times, the CPU in the PS4 and Xbox One is a bottleneck, especially in certain scenarios. Nintendo hates bottlenecks, and especially after the harsh criticism they received for the Wii U CPU, they probably wanted to balance the new console in a way that the CPU would never be an issue compared to the performances of the GPU. So if the GPU is 1tflop Nvidia, it falls between X1 and PS4 in real world performances, but something like the much speculated 8 core ARM A72 2GHZ would never be a bottleneck for that kind of performance. If the GPU was much more powerful than the PS4 though, they should've used a much more powerful CPU to avoid bottlenecks, otherwise CPU could still be a problem. Which would have probably brought the price higher than the one they wanted to set (and let's not forget that they don't want to sell the console at loss).

- ARM+Nvidia on both consoles means that they have to build only one OS and cross development between home and portable is as easy and streamlined as it gets (especially if, with tegra, the portable performances are better than expected). We speculated many times that AMD didn't have anything in the ultra low powered space and that could've caused issues (or Nintendo going with PowerVR for the handheld), but Nvidia does.

- Iwata said that the NX is being developed in a way that every future console will be natively compatible with the already existing games to avoid software droughts at launch and build a giant library of software. Many people said "but AMD is in dire financial straits, what would happen if they go bankrupt?". Maybe Nintendo thought the same thing and this was one of the reasons why they decided to go to Nvidia.

- On the other hand, Nvidia, unlike AMD, isn't known for its low prices. It's possible though that they wanted a big client for their Tegra line, so they gave Nintendo a killer deal for that and decided to settle for a low price (on par with what AMD would've asked?) for the home GPU as well. That's if the home doesn't use a very high clocked Tegra X1 (or the new Pascal version).

The only thing that still sounds weird to me is that Nintendo would think about ending their collaboration with AMD and give up to their low prices, but maybe the reasons above were enough to switch sides and Nvidia might have helped if they really wanted that Tegra win, with the expectation of higher margins in the future.


Interesting, do you have a source for this?
Click to expand...

I need to point out a slight flaw here: The rumored Apple chip is x86. That means that either the rumor is wrong, or there's no XboneZ and instead an ARM-based Xbox Next.
 
M

MuchoMalo

Banned
Orbit_shadow said:
how much would a pascal based tegra cost?

According to ZhugeEX, the Chinese "Fuze" Console pays 50 usd for each tegra x1 used.
Click to expand...

That's pretty good, actually, at lease for a console. For the record, PS4's APU was $100 at launch, and Wii U's was $80-100 at launch. Between this, a cheaper controller (let's say $40 vs. the GamePad's $80) and ~$20 net savings from dropping the ODD, that's $90-110 saved on the BOM already.
 
N

NateDrake

Member
Jaagen said:
Can anybody point me to what Emiy said about Nvidia? Her tweets are set to private, after all.
Click to expand...

This is what she said: Nvidia is involved with Nintendo's future hardware.

I talked with her about many things & Nvidia is definitely involved. Believe her & I if you so choose.
 
J

Jaagen

Member
NateDrake said:
This is what she said: Nvidia is involved with Nintendo's future hardware.

I talked with her about many things & Nvidia is definitely involved. Believe her & I if you so choose.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification. It would certainly be interessting if Nintendo choose to go with team green this time around.
 
A

AntMurda

Member
NateDrake said:
Consider it further confirmation of that report.
Click to expand...

I think there is one grand point. If the Zelda voice acting and gender choice happen, then what could i possibly argue against. Everything else sounds like she is riding off news / leaks and claiming it as her own like most internet prophets that have come and gone. But playing devil's advocate, who is Emily Rogers and why are so many Nintendo developers talking to her? It's multiple people apparently covering all sorts of aspects.
 
N

NateDrake

Member
AntMurda said:
I think there is one grand point. If the Zelda voice acting and gender choice happen, then what could i possibly argue against. Everything else sounds like she is riding off news / leaks and claiming it as her own like most internet prophets that have come and gone. But playing devil's advocate, who is Emily Rogers and why are so many Nintendo developers talking to her? It's multiple people apparently covering all sorts of aspects.
Click to expand...

She isn't riding off news/leaks and claiming it as her own. I will say that much. Consider the information 'Nate Verified'.
 
M

MomoQca

Member
So these are the non NX rumors that Emily has talked about this year (that I'm aware of):

-Paper Mario Wii U (confirmed)
-Mother 3
-Zelda is also coming to NX (confirmed). Will have voice acting with the exception of Link. Male/female playable character
-Retro Studios' new project is likely to be a new IP

Anything else?
 
F

fabricated backlash

Member
I am sorry but the way rumours are corroborated here does remind me too much of Homer Simpsons Website fact checking.
At this point I simply can't take any of these rumours seriously. Especially the NVIDIA one.
 
S

shark sandwich

tenuously links anime, pedophile and incels
AndyD said:
Pretty much. With x86 you might see a lot of PC/PS4/XOne ports, without, it will be a tougher sell. Unless it's closer to mobile chips in which case we might see a lot of Android/iOS ports.
Click to expand...
My understanding is that ISA (x86/ARM) has basically nothing to do with how easy it is to make a multiplatform title. It's not like they are going to take X1/PS4 binaries and run them on NX hardware.
 
N

Neoxon

Junior Member
MomoQca said:
So these are the non NX rumors that Emily has talked about this year (that I'm aware of):

-Paper Mario Wii U (confirmed)
-Mother 3
-Zelda is also coming to NX (confirmed). Will have voice acting with the exception of Link. Male/female playable character
-Retro Studios' new project is likely to be a new IP

Anything else?
Click to expand...
She specifically said that Retro's game wasn't Metroid or DK.
 
K

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
AndyD said:
Pretty much. With x86 you might see a lot of PC/PS4/XOne ports, without, it will be a tougher sell. Unless it's closer to mobile chips in which case we might see a lot of Android/iOS ports.
Click to expand...

shark sandwich said:
My understanding is that ISA (x86/ARM) has basically nothing to do with how easy it is to make a multiplatform title. It's not like they are going to take X1/PS4 binaries and run them on NX hardware.
Click to expand...

I think Blu's post explains it best:

blu said:
Trev is pushing it a bit with the 'a lot of 3rd party AAA games use custom engines' statement, but is clearly wrong about the 're-optimise/recode engines from scratch'. Actually, the 'from scratch' part is absolutely not true.

An anecdote: I'm currently porting an amd64 pet-project of mine to arm64, where I had gone overboard with x86 intrinsics - original code was really game-engine-level-optimised, but for generic x86*, meaning it does both SSE and AVX. Since I want to keep the same level of generic optimisation on arm64, I'm meticulously changing amd64 intrinsics into arm64 intrinsics (alternatively, I could be dropping intrinsics altogether and get the port done in a fraction of the time, but I don't want to do that). But the changes I'm doing for the arm64 port are exactly in those isolated places where I've used the intrinsics, and the translation of the intrinsics themselves is fairly automatic. Curiously enough, I even spotted the other day on the web a fellow developer who had developed an automatic sse->neon conversion header for a subset of sse intrinsics he needed, so he could basically continue writing in sse intrinsics and get neon code generated automagically. So what I'm saying is that for engine code, the porting effort to get something generically-optimised for amd64 to the same level of generic optimisation on arm64 is much smaller than what Trev makes it out to be. Last but not least, engine maintenance is much more compact and is done by much fewer people than the actual games using the engine.

To reiterate something which has been repeated ad nauseam over the past few days: as long as NX has the performance bracket, arm64 is not an issue.

* generic x86 as in not targeting a particular uarch.
Click to expand...
 
C

Candescence

Member
AndyD said:
Pretty much. With x86 you might see a lot of PC/PS4/XOne ports, without, it will be a tougher sell. Unless it's closer to mobile chips in which case we might see a lot of Android/iOS ports.
Click to expand...

This argument has been debunked numerous times in this thread alone, porting from x86 to ARM these days and vice-versa is virtually trivial these days, and all the major engines support ARM already. Architecture is not nearly as important these days as some people are making it out to be.
 
Eolz

Eolz

Member
MomoQca said:
So these are the non NX rumors that Emily has talked about this year (that I'm aware of):

-Paper Mario Wii U (confirmed)
-Mother 3
-Zelda is also coming to NX (confirmed). Will have voice acting with the exception of Link. Male/female playable character
-Retro Studios' new project is likely to be a new IP

Anything else?
Click to expand...

Neoxon said:
She specifically said that Retro's game wasn't Metroid or DK.
Click to expand...

This to be more precise yeah. She said there was the possibility of it being a new IP, but nothing sure about that.
Also said the 4 wiiu ports to nx, with splatoon and mario maker being possibilities but not 100% sure.
 
Akhe

Akhe

Member
Pretty much I'm late as fuck but did someone saw this?

nx_rumour.jpg
 
T

Turrican3

Member
shark sandwich said:
My understanding is that ISA (x86/ARM) has basically nothing to do with how easy it is to make a multiplatform title. It's not like they are going to take X1/PS4 binaries and run them on NX hardware.
Click to expand...
Not to mention last gen we had Sony and Microsoft with a PPC-family processor, yet multiplatform releases PS3/X360/PC were fairly common.

Porting was (obviously) a nightmare when games were being written in assembly, but nowadays as far as I understand is more a matter of having adequate specs and proper middleware support. And publisher willing to port, by the way.
 
O

Oddduck

Member
Eolz said:
Also said the 4 wiiu ports to nx, with splatoon and mario maker being possibilities but not 100% sure.
Click to expand...

Yeah, she and Neal Ronaghan (Director of Nintendo World Report) claimed there were issues with Mario Maker/Splatoon at the moment.

But they were confident in Zelda/Smash ports. The former being recently confirmed.
 
Akhe

Akhe

Member
KingSnake said:
That's the newest rumor fed to the insatiable 10k by "friendly" people. There are 4chan rumors more reliable than this.
Click to expand...

Eolz said:
Yeah, most of it is just speculations and bouncing on other rumors from 10k/the guy feeding him.
Aka tales from his ass.
Click to expand...

NateDrake said:
It's all fake. Or like 99% of it is. The individual who gave the info was a person pretending to be an NoE employee.
Click to expand...

Man, nx rumours became a war zone.
 
T

The_Lump

Banned
Rodin said:
If what Emily said about Nvidia being involved is true, i think all the pieces of information we have would fit together.

- AMD has 3 wins: 2 x86 and 1 arm, one of them goes beyond gaming. These are PS4 Neo, new Xbox One and an Apple device. Neo and 1.5 technically aren't "new wins", but maybe it's something that they can spin (especially if the revisions use Polaris). It would also explain why they only expect 1.5b revenue from these.

- In late 2014-early 2015 (iirc), Nintendo was looking for Lead Graphic Engineer for Next-Gen Console. Experience with low power architecture was a bonus, and Nvidia GPUs are very power efficient (much more than AMD up to Maxwell vs GCN 1.2, we don't know about Pascal vs Polaris yet).

- LCGeek reported that the Nintendo NX CPU, while far from being a monster, is considerably more powerful than what the Xbox One and PS4 have.

- Emily Rogers said that the CPU isn't x86 and the specs on paper are closer to Xbox One than PS4, and "even that would be a stretch".

- If Nintendo went ARM+Nvidia, the above situation should be pretty clear even in the more pessimistic scenario. A 1tflop Nvidia GPU has lower numbers on paper but it absolutely destroys the Xbox One and comes pretty close to what the PS4 has (a 750ti, which is 1.3tflops, actually beats the PS4 in many situations as per Digital Foundry's tests). But isn't this a bit disappointing? A console that comes out in 2017 isn't considerably better in every way than two consoles that came out in late 2013? The answer should be yes, but there's another thing to consider: as we've seen many times, the CPU in the PS4 and Xbox One is a bottleneck, especially in certain scenarios. Nintendo hates bottlenecks, and especially after the harsh criticism they received for the Wii U CPU, they probably wanted to balance the new console in a way that the CPU would never be an issue compared to the performances of the GPU. So if the GPU is 1tflop Nvidia, it falls between X1 and PS4 in real world performances, but something like the much speculated 8 core ARM A72 2GHZ would never be a bottleneck for that kind of performance. If the GPU was much more powerful than the PS4 though, they should've used a much more powerful CPU to avoid bottlenecks, otherwise CPU could still be a problem. Which would have probably brought the price higher than the one they wanted to set (and let's not forget that they don't want to sell the console at loss).

- ARM+Nvidia on both consoles means that they have to build only one OS and cross development between home and portable is as easy and streamlined as it gets (especially if, with tegra, the portable performances are better than expected). We speculated many times that AMD didn't have anything in the ultra low powered space and that could've caused issues (or Nintendo going with PowerVR for the handheld), but Nvidia does.

- Iwata said that the NX is being developed in a way that every future console will be natively compatible with the already existing games to avoid software droughts at launch and build a giant library of software. Many people said "but AMD is in dire financial straits, what would happen if they go bankrupt?". Maybe Nintendo thought the same thing and this was one of the reasons why they decided to go to Nvidia.

- On the other hand, Nvidia, unlike AMD, isn't known for its low prices. It's possible though that they wanted a big client for their Tegra line, so they gave Nintendo a killer deal for that and decided to settle for a low price (on par with what AMD would've asked?) for the home GPU as well. That's if the home doesn't use a very high clocked Tegra X1 (or the new Pascal version).

The only thing that still sounds weird to me is that Nintendo would think about ending their collaboration with AMD and give up to their low prices, but maybe the reasons above were enough to switch sides and Nvidia might have helped if they really wanted that Tegra win, with the expectation of higher margins in the future.
Click to expand...

Good post. Makes a lot of sense.

jdstorm said:
More Tegra speculation but as some had speculated before.
The X1 can run at up to 3GHz in a home console according to Nvidia so hypothetically Nintendo could run its next evolution at 500mhz and get 200tFLPs of power at a draw low enough for a handheld. Then run the same chip at 3GHz in the console and get 1.2tflps which would put its power window right where Emily is speculating that t would be (just above the Xbox 1)
Click to expand...

If true, also would make sense. Too much sense in fact; my Nintendo-Sense is tingling. This sounds far too simple and sensible to be true ;)
 
C

cartographer

Member
I wonder how hard it would be to get 10k to post a rumor I made up. I imagine just an anonymous twitter account would be enough. Don't even think I would have to make some terribly faked credentials.
 
A

axisofweevils

Holy crap! Today's real megaton is that more than two people can have the same first name.
Arkeband said:
This has probably already been asked in the thread but it's so huge at this point:

When was the last time Emily was correct about insider info, and how many things has she said since then that were either wrong or haven't yet panned out?

If Mother 3 doesn't happen this year, does that deal a decisive blow to her credibility?
Click to expand...

Emily has a good track record. She correctly predicted the massive Streetpass update a few years ago - the one that added the fishing and zombie games on 3DS, even going as far as saying EU would get it before NA. She was also aware of the update that would enabled the Wii U gamepad to view Wii games long before it happened.
 
A

AndyD

aka andydumi
shark sandwich said:
My understanding is that ISA (x86/ARM) has basically nothing to do with how easy it is to make a multiplatform title. It's not like they are going to take X1/PS4 binaries and run them on NX hardware.
Click to expand...

KingSnake said:
I think Blu's post explains it best:
Click to expand...

Candescence said:
This argument has been debunked numerous times in this thread alone, porting from x86 to ARM these days and vice-versa is virtually trivial these days, and all the major engines support ARM already. Architecture is not nearly as important these days as some people are making it out to be.
Click to expand...

Stand well corrected. Thank you all.
 
O

Oddduck

Member
axisofweevils said:
Emily has a good track record. She correctly predicted the massive Streetpass update a few years ago - the one that added the fishing and zombie games on 3DS, even going as far as saying EU would get it before NA. She was also aware of the update that would enabled the Wii U gamepad to view Wii games long before it happened.
Click to expand...

Yeah I remember that too. I guess you're referring to this?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=593631

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=594186
 
Schnozberry

Schnozberry

Member
The_Lump said:
Good post. Makes a lot of sense.
Click to expand...

There's a lot of circumstantial evidence there, along with Nintendo's current head of Technology Development being a former Engineering Director at Nvidia. The connection is there, at least.

AMD's two X86 wins are likely the Neo and whatever the Xbox Revision is called, but the ARM design win is what they spoke of as "beyond gaming". My guess is that they weren't being as cryptic as we thought and they literally meant that it was a semi-custom win from outside the gaming industry.
 
O

Oddduck

Member
Schnozberry said:
There's a lot of circumstantial evidence there, along with Nintendo's current head of Technology Development being a former Engineering Director at Nvidia. The connection is there, at least.

AMD's two X86 wins are likely the Neo and whatever the Xbox Revision is called, but the ARM design win is what they spoke of as "beyond gaming".[/B] My guess is that they weren't being as cryptic as we thought and they literally meant that it was a semi-custom win from outside the gaming industry.
Click to expand...


I've seen a lot of articles claim that AMD scored some deal with Apple.

Rumor has it that Apple may contract AMD to design a semi-custom x86 SOC for its iMac products in 2017 and 2018. According to a report from Bitsandchips.it this deal would allow Apple to secure a high performance x86 SOC design at a significantly lower cost than competing Intel solutions.
Click to expand...

http://wccftech.com/amd-making-custom-x86-soc-apple-imacs-2017-2018/#ixzz48v0ZbLiN
 
O

ozfunghi

Member
LordOfChaos said:
Tegra now uses the same architecture as the desktop parts, so in terms of flops to shader performance it'll be similar to desktop parts, though it also seems to be ROP heavier as a ratio, probably since mobile tends to have such high res screens.

Light reading:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8811/nvidia-tegra-x1-preview/2.
Click to expand...

Hi, i was inquiering about the flop/compute balance in Tegra Pascal, compared to what's in the XBO/PS4 (GCN 1.0?) since you said Nvidia doesn't always outperform AMD per flop.
 
V

Vena

Member
I'm curious if Nintendo will go full custom or join the trend of semi-custom, off the shelf components.

TheGreatMightyPoo said:
The fake controller thread was perfect, look at many of the replies there.
LOL, Nintendo is done
this company, what a joke
RIP Nintendo
Click to expand...

Its more eye-opening on people who have deep insecurities with their purchasing habits and feel threatened.

:p
 
M

Meier

Member
It'll fail then and I probably won't bother spending my money on it to be honest. I haven't touched my Wii U much in ages but keep buying games for it for some reason out of a sense of loyalty and obligation I guess. I know better this time.

Nintendo going cheap on specs again means this lifetime fanboy is over it. No more.
 
V

Vena

Member
Instro said:
I wonder if Parker is at all viable. Probably too late in the game, but that would be nice.
Click to expand...

Would be easier for them for TDP, and other gains. But its not necessary.

But I don't think its too late in the game, Parker is ready for this year/next.
 
C

crooked spin

Member
Feeling cynical on Emily at the moment, gonna wait until the Zelda reveal to see if VA/gender options are in before I'm hopping on her NX info train.
 
T

The_Lump

Banned
Schnozberry said:
There's a lot of circumstantial evidence there, along with Nintendo's current head of Technology Development being a former Engineering Director at Nvidia. The connection is there, at least.

AMD's two X86 wins are likely the Neo and whatever the Xbox Revision is called, but the ARM design win is what they spoke of as "beyond gaming". My guess is that they weren't being as cryptic as we thought and they literally meant that it was a semi-custom win from outside the gaming industry.
Click to expand...

It's certainly a theory which seems to account for all the (legitimate) info we have so far, that's for sure. And that's quite a rare thing at the moment ;)
 
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