Reading through
Time's interview with Takahashi and Koizumi, I couldn't help but notice this particular comment by Koizumi:
Yoshiaki Koizumi said:
I'm sure a lot of people have lots of different ideas about what might potentially get connected to the system, and perhaps suddenly one day, we'll just pop up and say, 'Hey, now there's this'
Granted, he preceded this by commenting about the removable controllers, so he's likely talking about add-ons like the joycon variant with a proper d-pad we saw in the patent, but it's still a very interesting comment in the context of this thread. It also reiterates Nintendo's new approach of holding off on product reveals until as close to launch as possible. If Nintendo does release some kind of upgraded GPU dock, then I wouldn't expect to hear about it until perhaps a month or two before it hits shelves (although like PS4Pro, it would almost certainly leak beforehand).
That's interesting about the USB C connection and different protocols, I wasn't really aware of that. It makes sense that they didn't really design themselves into a corner in that aspect.
I'm curious about your thoughts regarding the fan being run in handheld mode (reportedly). Also we still haven't had Switch units demoed when not charging if I'm not mistaken, so I wonder what the effects of being on battery power will be.
Well, the patent did specifically refer to the fan running (at a lower RPM, afaik) while in handheld mode, so it shouldn't be that surprising. Thinking about it a little bit more, though, it's more likely that the fan isn't specifically tied to whether the unit is docked or not, but rather the temperature of the SoC (like virtually all other cooling solutions). The fan may remain on for a period of time after being undocked, until the SoC temp drops down below a particular threshold. Alternatively, an intensive game running in portable mode may cause the fan to kick in occasionally for short bursts if the temperature picks up. Similarly, the fan might actually stay off in docked mode for some games, such as 1, 2, Switch, which is unlikely to stress the SoC in either mode.
My question is, based on this new translation, how does this leaker seem to know that it's 16nm? He talks about it in the post describing the stress test, but he doesn't really connect his claim of 16nm to the CPU clocks, which is what we previously assumed was his chain of logic there.
So, why does he claim it's 16nm? Is that something he could possibly have seen?
I'm personally taking the 16nm claim as the leaker's assumption, as I don't see any way he would have had that info. Die sizes could obviously be measured, and the fact that they're made in Taiwan would be printed on the chip, but there's no reason for the fabrication process to be printed anywhere (especially if the manufacturer isn't even detailed).
Thanks I see the translation now.
I remember this line from earlier
"The enhanced version is very powerful, but also weighs more and feels worse in the hands. "
Along with saying it connects directly to TV instead of a dock, this is why I don't get why you're talking as if it's a dock.
They say about the "enhancer" that "It connects to the back of the main unit motherboard via some sort of PCI bridge.", which means it's a separate device which the Switch attaches to. The logic would be that it replaces the dock, hence why the Switch attaches to it, and why it has video out, no battery and a built-in power supply. That isn't the form factor of the dev kit they're describing, but early dev kits rarely resemble the final form factor of a piece of gaming hardware.