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What we know so far about the Nintendo NX with sources
- Thread starter Hero of Legend
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Mr. MondayNight
Member
I agree waiting until E3 would only make things worse, I would rather have them show it off early so I could try to gauge how much I should save.
Me too, when I'm not busy with school work.
Graphics Horse
Member
Is it possible that both of AMD's design wins due in 2016 (arm & x86 radeon apus) could both be for NX flavours? It was described as 'at least one being beyond gaming' but I have no idea what that means specifically.
Not sure considering that they're two completely different architectures.
A 'design win' in the context of AMD's comments refers to them signing a contract to design one or more semi-custom chips. If Nintendo had hired them for both the handheld and console, they wouldn't announce it as two separate design wins (as they almost certainly would have both been covered in the same negotiations and contract).
Well, Mother 3 will be out come E3 so that question can be skipped
It'll be a full year since M1 released. Makes sense to me. I wonder what the NWC games will be this year. Maybe they can have a Fed Force showdown.
Graphics Horse
Member
If they are going android-y it might not matter, but I don't know much about Dalcik or jit.
Wait so according to that article, VentureBeat say the 2nd x86 one is for the home console... wonder if they know that for sure.
Ah, makes sense.
TheMoon
Member
Fed Force Blind Co-Op Let's Play Race, winning team gets to see Metroid 5 demonstration by Sakamoto.
The VentureBeat article seems to be largely speculation of the "PS4 and XBO are x86, therefore Nintendo should use x86 as well" variety.
The three "design wins" seem likely to be the following:
ARM - Nintendo (home console, portable, or both)
x86 - Server or HPC custom chip
x86 - Apple (iMac custom APU)
deriks
4-Time GIF/Meme God
Graphics Horse
Member
makes sense... I think I remember that VB article now, they get a bit obsessed with powerpc BC. Feels like it was much longer than 6 months ago though, might have been something else from the same author.
That's not to say that x86 for the home console is impossible (who the hell knows with Nintendo), just that ARM seems to make a lot more sense for a variety of reasons. Some journalists just seem to think that x86 is a big deal for ports, perhaps under some sort of delusion that games are still written entirely in assembly language.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
TK1 (in a TDP-lax enclosure such as a tablet) performs roughly the same as an iPad Air 2, and AMD, while clearly delivering similar goods, does not have a competitive power/perf part @ 28nm. So yes, there are TK1-alternatives out there, but it's out of the question in a 28nm hh SoC.
Graphics Horse
Member
I guess the other question is do AMD actually have a working design for a mobile arm based apu? They have Mullins for x86 Puma cores but I don't know about ARM.
Forgive my ignorance on how these things are made but I assume 'semi custom' wouldn't cover changing one cpu architecture for another.
Forgive my ignorance on how these things are made but I assume 'semi custom' wouldn't cover changing one cpu architecture for another.
R
Rösti
Unconfirmed Member
I assume Mochizuki will be live tweeting from the Third Quarter Financial Results Briefing. If I am not mistaken, he did so for Nintendo's Corporate Management Policy Briefing/Second Quarter Financial Results Briefing on October 29 last year.
Indeed but no; The question is to know if popular game engines supports ARM. After a quick check, it seems it may not be the case sometimes. At least x86/x64 is the primary architecture, without a doubt.
And with Nintendo's current relationship with developers, every bit of things that makes them look marginal plays against them. And IMO, that sort of problem should be changed from the go on NX.
But given Nintendo's goal of unifying their consoles & handhelds to be "like brothers", it doesn't make sense for them to have two completely different architectures. And it's not like porting to ARM from x86 would be that bad for third parties. ARM across the board makes the most sense for what Nintendo supposedly wants for the NX Platform.
3,205 hours. (Till June 14 2016, when I assume Nintendo's E3 presentation will occur.)
Well, that's what makes it semi-custom. They have shipped lots of APUs, and they're now shipping ARM-based processors as well, so it's not an extraordinary leap for them, especially with ~2 years between design start and product launch.
Handheld is a different matter, though, as they don't have any experience at 28nm in the ~2W kind of power envelope you'd have to hit for handheld. That's not to say that they can't make something under 2W, but it probably wouldn't compete with companies for whom such low power envelopes are their day-to-day business (e.g. Imagination Technologies).
I still think it's feasible, as I believe Nintendo would be willing to make the trade-off of performance in order to have the same tech in both handheld and home console to make cross-development as simple as possible, but I'm sure Blu is about to disagree with me on that
There's also the possibility of 14nm, and AMD have been making a big deal about their gains in perf/W with their 14nm Polaris architecture, but it would probably be too expensive for Nintendo for a late 2016 launch.
Hero of Legend
Member
Soon NX will be within ARM's reach!
Hero of Legend
Member
Ducktaped. They got him too!
That's only going to be an issue if the NX console's processor doesn't clearly outperform PS4's.
You're still going to have to recompile your code for NX even if the console is a just a "souped-up" PS4.
Game engines aren't programmed in assembly any more than games are. If there's a new platform to support then compiling for ARM would be much less of an issue than, say, supporting a new, proprietary graphics API.
E3 is gonna be hype.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Which are those engines?
Hero of Legend
Member
We all know ARMs will do the heavy lifting!
First Ideaman, now him... Nninjas, Nninjas everywhere!
While I liked that approach from Sony, the biggest reason for their success was the trolling of Microsoft at their E3 press conference that year.
Well, Mother 3 will be out come E3 so that question can be skipped
I'm waiting for the "We have no plans to bring any of the Mother games to the NX Virtual Console"
Trevelyan9999
Banned
What happened to Rosti? I don't understand Mochi's tweet.....something going on?
Graphics Horse
Member
Hmm but that Tegra K1 is ~5w if I'm reading right, with Mullins supposedly lower. would a large form handheld make the difference or is it out of the question? A pocket version could be lined up once 14nm is affordable if so. (the inevitable 18 month later hh revision)
It was just a joke about supposedly (?) tight NDAs in place for NX.
I guess they took it from the NX hardware engineers.
I always thought Ideaman was French.
Hero of Legend
Member
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
5W is tablet territory. Try 2W, max 3W (with throttling). Remember the Shield hh with Tegra4 and active cooling? Yeah, nintendo would never do that.
Graphics Horse
Member
Yeah anyone invested in mobile will support arm, so pretty much everyone.
blu:
active cooling is a no no, but maybe tablet territory is where Nintendo want to be. I am expecting something on the relatively large size either way.
blu:
active cooling is a no no, but maybe tablet territory is where Nintendo want to be. I am expecting something on the relatively large size either way.
In theory Nintendo should be able to out-do a less-than-$199 smartphone in terms of the SoC, as it's likely to have a cheaper, lower-res screen, no cellular modem, etc. etc. Octo-core A53's would also be entirely possible, as they're very power efficient, and tiny even on a 28nm process (as far as I can recall about 1mm² per core and about 8mm² for a quad-core module with L2 cache). The performance we'll actually get is anyone's guess, though, as we don't know what Nintendo's goals are when choosing a SoC. Are they happy with something that's just a noticeable step-up from the 3DS now that they don't have any direct competition? Will they go high-performance on the handheld to get it as close as possible to the console to ease cross-development? Is there anything expensive like a free-form display on there? What are they looking to charge for it? Will they be willing to take a loss on early units, and if so how much? Lots of things that we don't know are going to have a play in things, so all we can really do is look at the options open to Nintendo and make a few guesses from there.
A handheld is more likely to use a smartphone-class power envelope than tablet-class (i.e. 2W vs 5W). You could try a "large form factor" handheld with a tablet SoC, but the last device to attempt that was the Nvidia Shield, which was a monstrous device by Nintendo's standards and even ended up needing active cooling to boot.
Edit: Beaten by Blu, and with a Shield reference too, no less.
The Nintendo Mmmmmm
The Nintendo Mmmmmm goes beyond language barriers and is universally understood!
E-phonk, that list is really useful. Good job putting that together! It's certainly seeming like Nintendo may go with ARM after all for their systems, with any luck.
We're back to "architecture" misconceptions again? Look, the CPU platform doesn't matter from a software standpoint, assuming there is a console and a handheld they actually don't gain that much by making them the same. That's what a compiler does, it compiles code to a particular instruction set. It makes more sense to make logical choices about architecture based on other factors, like what is a reasonable get from that market. There aren't really any x86 chips getting ARM-like power/thermal efficiency (despite what Intel would have you believe), and certainly not from AMD. That said, there aren't really any ARM chips getting x86 power (despite what Apple would have you believe), and certainly not from AMD. I assume that if they made a switch at the console level, it's to x86 with an AMD GPU, and at the portable level they are likely happy with ARM and will license a GPU design from ARM/Imagine etc. since AMD doesn't make one for ARM SoCs. Now they could do a console SoC with ARM but considering how little exists in that space they'd pay a lot of R&D to get something of parity.
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