Yea, unfortunately there's not a whole lot that could be done about that. Various approaches of increasing cache here and there
help, but don't completely solve the issue.
Fundamentally, the issue is that the active transfer of data costs energy. And Thraktor has a post
here making some estimates. To quote the specific paragraph I had in mind:
"The capacity of the memory shouldn't impact the performance, just the speed, width and type of the interface. I calculated a little while back that LPDDR5 probably has around 4 picoJoules per bit (pJ/b) of energy consumption, based on claims from manufacturers on LPDDR4X consumption and efficiency improvements for LPDDR5, but it's only a rough estimate, and likely to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. If it is 4 pJ/b, though, then the power consumption for 102.4GB/s would be a bit over 3.3W. For LPDDR5X,
Samsung claims 20% less power consumption than LPDDR5, so we could expect about 3.2 pJ/b, which would result in a bit over 3.5W to hit the maximum 136GB/s. For comparison, I'd say the LPDDR4 in the original Switch consumed between 1.5W to 2W for 25.6GB/s of bandwidth, so it's an increase over the original model either way. My guess is that the memory will be clocked quite a bit lower in portable mode to accommodate for this."
And the Switch's usage & form factor realistically allows for only so many watts. To recap, citing
this article, the OG Switch itself needs about 11 watts while docked and 7.1-8.9 watts while undocked, depending on screen brightness.
That's not to say that Drake will necessarily have the same power consumption numbers. I just listed the above as an example.
My personal speculation bouncing around in my head for fun (please don't take this as hard expectations):
~15 watts docked, ~8-9 watts undocked (excluding screen).
Earlier I said 2 watts for the CPU; I think that CPU clocks will remain the same in both modes.
I expect either eMMC or eUFS as internal storage. Ergo, I assume 0.5 to 1 watts when active (that is, I assume operating conditions to vary from 25 Celsius to... somewhere higher than 25 C, but nowhere near 85 C).
Docked: be it either LPDDR5 or 5X, I expect full speed, so pencil in low to mid 3 watts. I think that we're at ~6 watts now? Alright then, 8-9 watts for the GPU. With 12 SMs, that's 2/3 to 3/4 of a watt per SM.
Undocked: RAM may be clocked down to... about 7/8th of its LPDDR5 max or 2/3 of its LPDDR5X max, so ~2.8 or ~2.33 watts. Shit, that's a wider range than I'd like given this much room to work with. That's like... 5 to low 5 point something watts from CPU + RAM + actively using internal storage. Ehhh, I guess 3-4 watts for the GPU means 1/4 to 1/3 of a watt per SM.
Yaknow, in certain contexts, 12 SMs is
freaking huge, man.
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Re: Tape out
Yea, I wouldn't expect to hear about it whenever it happens, or if it has happened already. The specific source who told us that that chip wasn't taped out as of early 2021, has been under NDA since like, summer of last year. I don't think that we've heard anybody else speak on this particular topic.