• 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.

Nintendo Switch Dev Kit Stats Leaked? Cortex A57, 4GB RAM, 32GB Storage, Multi-Touch.

Status
Not open for further replies.

Speely

Banned
Plus, they made it easier for smaller devs to not have to upclock the Switch while docked for both the GPU and RAM so there'll be games with no change at all while docked. That might anger some people. lol

I'm thinking Pokémon Stars will be the first to do this.

You know, I am actually excited about this possibility. It provides an established lower barrier of entry for smaller indie devs, and I want to see as many of them making Switch games as possible. Faster turnover, lower price, etc. It would compliment Nintendo's AAA stream of releases quite well imo.
 

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
It's absolutely not, and likely will never be for this iteration of the Switch. The EG piece even details how devs can intentionally "throttle" (my paraphrasing, not theirs afaik) docked performance for devs who just want to target the portable mode and call it a day.

Edit: Just saw your edit... I see that you were remarking upon devs utilizing other benefits as opposed to increased resolution, not just commenting on a forced rez increase. Apologies for the misunderstanding.
No biggie as you responded to my unedited post.
 

Zil33184

Member
This is just a neogaf meme you know? People weren't actually expecting xbox one 1 performance (they were expecting tegra x1 performance), yet everyone seems adamant in insisting people in speculation threads did expect XB1 performance.

They weren't expecting TX1 performance. I did, but I can tell you that many people in this thread weren't happy with the dev kit leak and expected a lot more.
 

ggx2ac

Member
You know, I am actually excited about this possibility. It provides an established lower barrier of entry for smaller indie devs, and I want to see as many of them making Switch games as possible. Faster turnover, lower price, etc. It would compliment Nintendo's AAA stream of releases quite well imo.

The fact that it's been confirmed now that Switch supports Vulkan, OpenGL v4.5 and OpenGL ES v3.2 means that it's much easier for Indies and mobile developers to put their games on Switch.

Now, Nintendo may not put their mobile games on Switch (but that's still up in the air until January 13th) however, OpenGL ES is what the majority of mobile developers use and someone else pointed out that OpenGL is what indies use to port their games to Linux and Mac.

So along with the microarchitecture, the Switch shouldn't have barriers getting indie and mobile games on their platform. It will likely have better support than the Wii U and 3DS did.
 
Edit: Diregard. According to Blu the A57 wasn't as large a step up from the A15 as the chart makes it seem.



Oh, regarding CPU... Can someone fact check this? This is my understanding...

The A15 cores was roughly equivalent to Jaguar cores... Beat them is some things but not others...

Here's how the A15 compares to the A57.... of course, this is in broad terms, as not all A15s or A57s are created equal...

Cortex-A15-vs-Cortex-A57_performance.jpg


So, four A57s clocked at 1GHz will have a little less performance that 8 Jaguar cores... They'll have almost twice the performance per core but half the threads, obviously... So, now we just need to know if the Switch OS will play into the equation or if it will either completely go away in game mode or have a LITTLE core dedicated to it... If the 4 A57s are dedicated to gaming with LITTLE cores handling OS... then they would be just about on par with the Jaguar Octo-cores, since they don't get to use all 8 cores for gaming.

I say this because as long as the CPUs can handle a game's logic the graphics can be scaled pretty heavily...
 

Lom1lo

Member
They weren't expecting TX1 performance. I did, but I can tell you that many people in this thread weren't happy with the dev kit leak and expected a lot more.
I expected a bit more than Tegra x1 Performance. I think arround 800gf was not impossible. Now I cant see how it will run third party games that run at 720p on xone. This thing is in docked mode 5 times weaker and undocked its nearly 10 Times.
And after this whole 500 man years custom Chip, no one thought of a downclocked tx1, lol.
 

Zedark

Member
They weren't expecting TX1 performance. I did, but I can tell you that many people in this thread weren't happy with the dev kit leak and expected a lot more.

Some were expecting Tegra Parker levels of performance (768 GFLOPS) but after the hybrid revelation no one (that is, hardly anyone, some crazies are always there) was saying it would go significantly higher than that number.
 

Xellos

Member
The Switch is the Maxwell (HA!) Smart of consoles.

"I have 1TF of GPU performance in this handheld."
"I don't believe you."
"Would you believe 512GF in docked mode?"
"..."
"Would you believe 3 Wii U's duct taped together?"

Heh, got a pretty good laugh at this.
 
Plus, they made it easier for smaller devs to not have to upclock the Switch while docked for both the GPU and RAM so there'll be games with no change at all while docked. That might anger some people. lol

I'm thinking Pokémon Stars will be the first to do this.

As it seems the power plus when docked is exactly what is needed to increase resolution from 720p in handheld mode to 1080p in docked mode. So it seems very easy for developers to use docked mode.
 
Back when Pascal was a possibility, I was personally expecting some custom solution that allowed for around 768 GFLOPS docked with around 512 undocked. When Maxwell was rumored to be what this thing was using, I was expecting around 512 docked and around 256 or so undocked. Wasn't expecting the clock speeds to be this low for a dedicated gaming device with active cooling and no Android overhead :(
 

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
I excepted the max performance the default Parker architecture could offer at base clock speed. I never accounted the necessity of running the system on battery though.
 

ggx2ac

Member
Literally nobody expects anything but Sun and Moon-esque visuals in HD, because that's exactly what we'll get.

There won't be any salt.

Ahh... I doubt that. I think expectations are high judging from all the people in the Eurogamer thread that said, "I'll finally get to experience playing this on a home console with true HD visuals."
 

z0m3le

Banned
Counting architectural differences, supposedly it will be around 1.5x as powerful undocked. And with dock mode, could be up to 4x. A shame Dock mode is just going to increase resolution only though.

I wonder if there will be games that will take advantage of dock mode power only.

No, you are forgetting half precision can put the performance of the switch when mobile around 250gflops, that is roughly 2.5times wii u's performance. Not to mention it is only powering 1 screen at 720p with a dimension of 6.2inches (same size as wii u's gamepad)

Slightly harder to nail down the docked performance, but if we just scaled it with clock, you get 625gflops over 6times wii u's performance docked(again mix of fp32 and fp16) which is similar to the GCN inside xb1 and ps4 at 875gflops. These are rough estimates and not exact, not every engine uses fp16 yet, but it is being adopted by AMD starting with Vega, so I assume it will be used heavily in the next few years.
 

AzaK

Member
Honestly.. What's to stop Nintendo from upclocking the cpu and gpu right before launch?They did that with the wii u apparently, right?.

More than likely they had the x1 from the get go and just down clocked to see how much they can improve with the battery life.
They could do it back to x1 specs, which is increase by around ~ 25% power which could be from 150-->200 TFLOPS in portable and 400-->512TFLOPS docked.

god this makes me sound like in the denial stage of grief


If the specs are really that mediocre, Nathan's battery life rumor of +5 hours might end up being legit all(he said the source is completely separate from the Pascal rumor he's known since July btw).
No, they downclocked it late in the game according to bgassassin.

So we moved from under Xbone to slightly Wii U to good for 3DS uports
Well Nintendo is on the rehash train so why not now rehash 3DS games too!
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
I refuse to get my hopes up again with 3 SM or more or by counting on FP 16 too much. For now I consider it a half of Shield TV that transforms into a half of Shield tablet.
 
Oh, regarding CPU... Can someone fact check this? This is my understanding...

The A15 cores was roughly equivalent to Jaguar cores... Beat them is some things but not others...

Here's how the A15 compares to the A57.... of course, this is in broad terms, as not all A15s or A57s are created equal...

Cortex-A15-vs-Cortex-A57_performance.jpg


So, four A57s clocked at 1GHz will have a little less performance that 8 Jaguar cores... They'll have almost twice the performance per core but half the threads, obviously... So, now we just need to know if the Switch OS will play into the equation or if it will either completely go away in game mode or have a LITTLE core dedicated to it... If the 4 A57s are dedicated to gaming with LITTLE cores handling OS... then they would be just about on par with the Jaguar Octo-cores, since they don't get to use all 8 cores for gaming.

I say this because as long as the CPUs can handle a game's logic the graphics can be scaled pretty heavily...

i was under the impression that a57 and jaguar at the same clockspeeds are close to even per core. ~10% diff
 

blu

Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Oh, regarding CPU... Can someone fact check this? This is my understanding...

The A15 cores was roughly equivalent to Jaguar cores... Beat them is some things but not others...

Here's how the A15 compares to the A57.... of course, this is in broad terms, as not all A15s or A57s are created equal...

Cortex-A15-vs-Cortex-A57_performance.jpg


So, four A57s clocked at 1GHz will have a little less performance that 8 Jaguar cores... They'll have almost twice the performance per core but half the threads, obviously... So, now we just need to know if the Switch OS will play into the equation or if it will either completely go away in game mode or have a LITTLE core dedicated to it... If the 4 A57s are dedicated to gaming with LITTLE cores handling OS... then they would be just about on par with the Jaguar Octo-cores, since they don't get to use all 8 cores for gaming.

I say this because as long as the CPUs can handle a game's logic the graphics can be scaled pretty heavily...
The IPC difference between A15 and A57 is 20%-25%. There's no way 4x A57 @ 1GHz to roughly equal 8x Jaguar @ 1.6GHz.
 

Rodin

Member
According to the Eurogamer article, the chipset inside the Switch will include Pascel-like features. What does everything think that means?
Better color compression i think. The other thing would be 16nm but it doesn't make sense considering there's a fan in there, and it's unlikely that the chip has more than 2SM.

The IPC difference between A15 and A57 is 20%-25%. There's no way 4x A57 @ 1GHz to roughly equal 8x Jaguar @ 1.6GHz.
How far behind are 3-4 A57 at 1GHZ compared to 6 Jaguar at 1.6?
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
What CPU would it be if it's outperforming the CPU inside XB1 but only running at 1GHz ?

Has LC posted after this latest info ?


Yes. She didn't thought that Nintendo would cut the clock so much for the CPU.

And it's not outperfoming the XB1 CPU at this clock. Far from it, considering the core count too.
 

z0m3le

Banned
Yes. She didn't thought that Nintendo would cut the clock so much for the CPU.

And it's not outperfoming the XB1 CPU at this clock. Far from it, considering the core count too.

Which is why it is very weird that they put a fan in it. It just doesn't make sense to me if the configuration is the same as maxwell.

As for SCD, switch could already be capable of handling extra power through a dock. If the USB-C has thunderbolt, or even just 3.1, Nintendo could sell a 4k dock. Since it is all one architecture and OS, it would be far more seamless than ps4 pro and work more like xb1s's performance upgrade but far more drastic. This is already possible with pcs.
 

Nikodemos

Member
So by now we've got a rough picture of what the Switch looks like, right?

nVidia Tegra X1 SoC
RAM: 4 GB LPDDR4 @1600 MHz, downscalable @1331 MHz in mobile mode (if req.); 3.5 GB dev accessible, 0.5 GB OS-reserved (tent.);
CPU: 4x Cortex-A57 @1020 MHz; 4x Cortex-A53 @700-750 MHz (tent.) not dev accessible, OS-reserved;
GPU: 2x Maxwell @768 MHz, downscaled @307.2 MHz in mobile mode;
Storage: 32 GB internal, upgradable via MicroSD (tent.).
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom