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Nintendo Switch Console 2

For well over a decade, Nintendo has pursued a console strategy that put an emphasis on new and emerging gameplay equally opposed to pushing graphics and CPU horsepower. This strategy has had incomparably mixed results, and with the Nintendo Switch, at that place was speculation that the company might have adopted a fundamentally different approach. Dissimilar the Wii and Wii U, Switch is supposed to be a hybrid mobile and living room console, suggesting Nintendo might put much more accent on adopting a leading-edge process node and cutting-edge graphics engineering to reduce power consumption and improve operation-per-watt.

A new report from GamesBeat suggests this is not the case — at to the lowest degree not to the extent that fans may have hoped. Sources have stated that the SoC inside the Nintendo Switch is congenital on Maxwell, not Pascal, and uses 20nm engineering science, presumably from TSMC. This would be ironic if true, considering Nvidia was the commencement major firm to raise concerns about the suitability of TSMC's 20nm node for GPUs back in 2012, but the Tegra X1 that Nvidia built in 2015 and that the Switch is supposed to use is a far cry from the 150-250W TDP graphics cards Nvidia had in heed back then. Maxwell was a power-efficient compages and the die shrink from 28nm to 20nm would definitely have given the chip a little extra headroom, but the fact that it's a tablet function is going to put significant restrictions on how much horsepower Nintendo can evangelize.

To some extent, this may not affair. The Switch only has a 720p screen and Nintendo could stretch its power budget farther by cutting a game'south native resolution to 540p and upscaling for 720p or even 1080p when plugged into a boob tube. The PlayStation 4 Pro has demonstrated that this kind of arroyo tin can produce very good results, even if they aren't quite every bit good as native content. GamesBeat expects the Switch to offer ~1 TFLOP of processing power, which would exist ~2x better than the Tegra X1 Nvidia launched back in Jan 2015. A die-shrink to 20nm could've helped Nvidia become partway at that place, but we'll accept to wait and encounter if the chip offers this much processing power. At the same time, however, we accept to annotation that TFLOPS are the wrong fashion to compare potential horsepower against graphics processors.

NX_hardware

The NX Switch and its controllers.

The TFLOPS metric that Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all collectively similar to quote is null but a measurement of peak throughput given an idealized ready of instructions and an infinite power upkeep. It can be used to approximate performance inside the same GPU family, merely information technology doesn't tell you much virtually performance between dissimilar families. TFLOPS only captures the number of floating point operations a GPU tin can complete per 2d; it doesn't tell y'all how long a tablet can sustain that rate, how much fill up rate the GPU offers, or how many texture mapping units information technology has. That'southward why we typically refer to these three measurements in sequence. The Tegra X1, for example, is a 512:xvi:16 design, with 512 cores, 16 texture mapping units (TMUs) and 16 render outputs (ROPS). Ability consumption, non TFLOPS, is almost certainly the limiting factor here.

Given these new revelations, we can offset to put some upper and lower boundaries on the Switch'due south potential performance. The worst-case scenario — and I find this unlikely — is that the Switch would offer Wii U-equivalent graphics in a mobile form cistron. What seems more probable is that Nintendo will offer some iterative improvements over the Wii U, simply that developers will still have to work hard to balance frame rate, power consumption, and system battery life.

As for why Nintendo didn't use Pascal or 14/16nm engineering, the answer is uncomplicated: When Nintendo started working the Switch, those technologies weren't mature enough for adoption. Nintendo appears to have recognized that ane of the things that crippled the Wii U was the lack of games immediately after launch, and wanted to get hardware into developer hands apace to avoid a repeat of this disaster. That meant working with engineering that was readily available, and that meant rolling a custom version of Nvidia's X1 rather than waiting until a Pascal-derived SoC was available.