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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)

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RennanNT said:
One thing to keep in mind is that the Switch is pretty much guaranteed to get a lot of profit for the next 3 or so years. What they should be focusing on is keeping those profit levels way beyond that.

The announcement, release and marketing campaign for the system to become their next baseline should all be decided around paving the way for it to sell 100+ mi units, not to make a little more money in short term.
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Sadly maximing sales was Nintendo's MO during the Wii era. Wii U should have launched 2010 as an iterative successor as the Wii 2 with full BC. The only thing Pachter said I agreed on
 
Dakhil said:
fuse.wikichip.org

Arm Unveils Next-Gen Flagship Core: Cortex-X3

Arm announces its next-generation flagship core: the Cortex-X3.
fuse.wikichip.org fuse.wikichip.org
fuse.wikichip.org

Arm Introduces The Cortex-A715

Arm introduces next-generation big core: Cortex-A715.
fuse.wikichip.org fuse.wikichip.org
fuse.wikichip.org

Arm Refreshes The Cortex-A510, Squeezes Higher Efficiency

Arm refreshes the Cortex-A510 core, squeezes higher efficiency.
fuse.wikichip.org fuse.wikichip.org
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The Cortex-A715 supports up to 12 CPU cores per cluster. In comparison, the Cortex-A710 supports up to 8 CPU cores per cluster.
 
Dekuman said:
Sadly maximing sales was Nintendo's MO during the Wii era. Wii U should have launched 2010 as an iterative successor as the Wii 2 with full BC. The only thing Pachter said I agreed on
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Nah, they should've had a proper successor with improved motion controls and power somewhere close to but below an XB1 back in 2012. The issue was the console they released, not when
 
Ragna said:
I agree on the point they won't want to split their software up majorly between drake and OG, but at same time, that doesn't mean they won't slowly over a certain period, phase out 1st party support for the OG and then focus solely on the drake model.
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Nintendo literally has half a dozen options for post-Drake.

Nintendo could phase out OG
switch over time converting Drake to the primary platform, and soft transition between gens

Nintendo could ship Drake with really pathetic clocks, limited battery life, targeted as a SteamDeck competitor, and in 2025 launch a “real” Switch 2 that is Drake with a die shrink, better clocks, and a 1080p VRR/HDR screen, but make cross gen games with Pro but not Classic

Nintendo could launch Pro, decide it was an architectural misstep, and pivot entirely for next gen.

They could decide it was architecturally brilliant but that they want two hardware lines again, and make next gen a home console that uses the same arch, allowing software teams to use a unified tool set

Or or or.

Switch was an unusual console, it’s not been since the OG Xbox that someone built a console with mostly off the shelf parts. But it was an architectural dead end, with Maxwell not having a modern feature set. Drake gives them the option to try a new hardware arch without breaking console gens, and let’s them use the huge power jump to solve backwards compat with the Switch library and let that solution mature.

Drake can have been worth the R&D purely by having Pro break even no matter what they do after.
 
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Skittzo said:
They probably will. At least with some games, probably stuff like Pokemon and Kirby at least.
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MondoMega said:
They've got to let it go eventually but I wouldn't be surprised if a few things were still compatible on the original model that far down the track, yeah. Absolutely disagree on full support for the original Switch still going on that far from now, but select titles I can see.
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I highly doubt it won’t be totally phased out by 2027. It will be dead weight by that point.
Pokemon Gen 10 will also likely be a 4k exclusive, following the series‘ normal path.
 
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Dakhil said:
The Cortex-A715 supports up to 12 CPU cores per cluster. In comparison, the Cortex-A710 supports up to 8 CPU cores per cluster.
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Huh, that's... interesting. So the DSU-110 update last year allows for 8 cores (be it 8 X-2's, 8 A710's, 8 A510's, or even 8 pairs of A510's... there's some merged core business going on with that), like so:
CPU_50.png


Twelve A715's though? Wonder if the DSU got silently updated to allow the dual rings to be stretched to six stops each?
 
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I don't know how this was under my radar until today.

But on 16 November 2021, Arm announced the Cortex-X1C, which has two possible configurations: 8 Cortex-X1C cores or 4 Cortex-X1C cores and 4 Cortex-A78C cores. Arm also mentioned the Cortex-X1C has 22% higher performance compared to the Cortex-A78C. (And the Cortex-X1C has the same amount of L3 cache as the Cortex-A78C at 8 MB.)

Arm mentioned "gaming" 8 times and "on-the-go" 5 times when talking about the Cortex-A78C. Arm mentioned "gaming" and "on-the-go" 0 times when talking about the Cortex-X1C.

So the question is: are Nintendo and Nvidia the only companies using the Cortex-A78C? :unsure:

(Qualcomm's probably using the Cortex-X1C for the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.)
 
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Dakhil said:
I don't know how this was under my radar until today.

But on 16 November 2021, Arm announced the Cortex-X1C, which has two possible configurations: 8 Cortex-X1C cores or 4 Cortex-X1C cores and 4 Cortex-A78C cores. Arm also mentioned the Cortex-X1C has 22% higher performance compared to the Cortex-A78C. (And the Cortex-X1C has the same amount of L3 cache as the Cortex-A78C at 8 MB.)

Arm mentioned "gaming" 7 times and "on-the-go" 5 times when talking about the Cortex-A78C. Arm mentioned "gaming" and "on-the-go" 0 times when talking about the Cortex-X1C.

So the question is: are Nintendo and Nvidia the only companies using the Cortex-A78C? :unsure:

(Qualcomm's probably using the Cortex-X1C for the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.)
Click to expand...

The second A78c link you provided has gaming 9 times.
 
Skittzo said:
They probably will. At least with some games, probably stuff like Pokemon and Kirby at least.
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there's gonna be a lot of indie games still on the switch, right up until NIntendo closes submission for it

Look over there said:
Criminy, it's been more than a year and a half since the A78C announcement already? And still no (publicly announced) product utilizing it to my knowledge?
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outside of a gaming device, the only system that could use it is a laptop, and WinARM only, officially, supports Qualcomm. Chromebooks could use it, but it could probably be better served with just 4 big cores and 4 small cores. android gaming devices don't have bespoke SoCs, they just pull from what's already made

so Drake would probably be the only system to use it
 
9-Volt said:
Batman Arkham Collection was no show in the direct which makes me more inclined to believe Arkham Knight in that collection is Drake exclusive and all three games will be sold separately on eShop. I'm not sure how feasible to downport such limit pushing open world game to Switch But making it exclusive to the stronger iteration will be much cheaper for WB.

Hogwarts Legacy is probably a base Switch game but enhanced on Drake. WB avoided talking about it most likely because they saving it for Drake showcase.
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Hogwarts Legacy has pre-orders up for Switch at stores, so it is definitely a base Switch game. I think you are right about there being an enhanced version (Drake) that WB is holding back from showing.
 
9-Volt said:
Batman Arkham Collection was no show in the direct which makes me more inclined to believe Arkham Knight in that collection is Drake exclusive and all three games will be sold separately on eShop. I'm not sure how feasible to downport such limit pushing open world game to Switch But making it exclusive to the stronger iteration will be much cheaper for WB.

Hogwarts Legacy is probably a base Switch game but enhanced on Drake. WB avoided talking about it most likely because they saving it for Drake showcase.
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Two games on the Switch & Arkham Knight in the cloud. All three on the Drake.
 
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OT:All this talk about Clocks and Drake makes me wish that Coldplay and Drake did a collab.


Are people feeling more and more confident about a 2023 release? They are still having supply issues with OLED, so I'm curious to know how that fits into the equation. Also, wouldn't they have to do a steep price drop once the new model is announced?
 
A710 and 715 being able to do 8-12 core Setup respectively really superseded the A78C…. How did I not realize this?
 
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kimbo99 said:
They are still having supply issues with OLED, so I'm curious to know how that fits into the equation. Also, wouldn't they have to do a steep price drop once the new model is announced?
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As far as internal components are concerned, probably not in any significant way, since Nintendo's new hardware is going to use a different SoC, different RAM, perhaps different internal flash storage, and etc., compared to the OLED model. As for the components Nintendo's new hardware shares with the OLED model, I'm not sure.

And not necessarily, especially with inflation still happening around the world, I think. (At least not right away.)
But speaking of inflation:
www.tomshardware.com

Valve Halves Steam Deck SSD Bandwidth on Some Models

Valve says this change will not affect gaming performance
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com
ReddDreadtheLead said:
A710 and 715 being able to do 8-12 core Cornish respectively really superseded the A78C…. How did I not realize this?
Click to expand...
Perhaps that's one of the reasons Arm dropped 32-bit support for the Cortex-A715? :unsure:
 
kimbo99 said:
OT:All this talk about Clocks and Drake makes me wish that Coldplay and Drake did a collab.


Are people feeling more and more confident about a 2023 release? They are still having supply issues with OLED, so I'm curious to know how that fits into the equation. Also, wouldn't they have to do a steep price drop once the new model is announced?
Click to expand...
The obvious solution would to be take oled's spot in the production line and leave the lite and red box model. A $50 difference won't mean much when you can no longer find an oled
 
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I'm not sure if dropping 32-bit support would've reduced area enough to get to 12 cores; looks like there was some increases in other places anyway. Though simplifying the decoders like that seemed to be huge for power savings.
Shame that the A510 refresh doesn't mention whether it got bumped up from 8/"16" to 12/"24" or not.
 
Look over there said:
I'm not sure if dropping 32-bit support would've reduced area enough to get to 12 cores; looks like there was some increases in other places anyway. Though simplifying the decoders like that seemed to be huge for power savings..
Click to expand...
I think Arm mentioned that only having 64-bit support allows Arm to design decoders 4x smaller than the ones on the Cortex-A710 for the Cortex-A715.
Arm says that due to the more normal nature of AArch64, the new decoders can not only be more efficiently designed and optimized, but they are also considerably smaller. In fact, Arm says the new decoders are actually "4x smaller than the ones found in the Cortex-A710 with power-saving to match" which is quite remarkable.
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MondoMega said:
There was a question about their large inventory in the shareholder meeting. Furukawa points to the raw materials as the reason but doesn't elaborate on how they'll be used; non-answer pretty much.

Click to expand...

DeepL'd it

Question 9.
Inventories have increased by about 110 billion yen.
It is too large. What is the cause?
How do you plan to resolve it?

Furukawa: "(This is a technical and difficult topic, so I'll skip a lot of it.) One reason is that we have a lot of raw materials, and there is also the effect of changes in accounting procedures. The treatment of subcontracted assemblers has changed."
------
Yeah, after reading fwd's post, I thought Investors would not be happy about >50% of the company's financial value being raw material with no apparent explanation.
 
My Tulpa said:
Eh, you are proving my point that it’s semantics and not indicative of anything.
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It isn't. A new generation of console allows to make games which aren't feasible with the previous generation. That is the case with the Series S, not with the XBOX 1X which was still held back by several components.

And if Drake releases, it will also be the case as compared to the Switch.
 
Bosintang said:
It isn't. A new generation of console allows to make games which aren't feasible with the previous generation. That is the case with the Series S, not with the XBOX 1X which was still held back by several components.

And if Drake releases, it will also be the case as compared to the Switch.
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This just goes back to the Gameboy and GBC debate doesn't it? Many believe it a successor cause of all it brought to table,, but nintendo counts it together with Gameboy as a revision. That's all this really comes down to is marketing on their end
 
Bosintang said:
It isn't. A new generation of console allows to make games which aren't feasible with the previous generation. That is the case with the Series S, not with the XBOX 1X which was still held back by several components.

And if Drake releases, it will also be the case as compared to the Switch.
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It's technically correct, but... From a commercial point of view, the line up is more relevant than the components.

Wii has many components of the GC, but it has exclusive games and controllers and It was saled as a new console.

If Drake has the shared line up with Switch OG, it will be perceived as a pro version.
 
Dakhil said:
I think Arm mentioned that only having 64-bit support allows Arm to design decoders 4x smaller than the ones on the Cortex-A710 for the Cortex-A715.
Click to expand...
Right, but looking at the provided slides, it doesn't seem like the decode lanes took up a large enough chunk of the mid-core to impact the total area to the point of being able to cram in 50% more cores. And not all the space saved on decoders are pocketed. In the back-end, L2 TLB got bumped up. There's also a doubling of data cache banks, but I don't know where that would be in the slide.
 
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MondoMega said:
There was a question about their large inventory in the shareholder meeting. Furukawa points to the raw materials as the reason but doesn't elaborate on how they'll be used; non-answer pretty much.

Click to expand...

Alovon11 said:
DeepL'd it

Question 9.
Inventories have increased by about 110 billion yen.
It is too large. What is the cause?
How do you plan to resolve it?

Furukawa: "(This is a technical and difficult topic, so I'll skip a lot of it.) One reason is that we have a lot of raw materials, and there is also the effect of changes in accounting procedures. The treatment of subcontracted assemblers has changed."
------
Yeah, after reading fwd's post, I thought Investors would not be happy about >50% of the company's financial value being raw material with no apparent explanation.
Click to expand...
I would not jump to any conclusions, based on the information that the tweet gave us it seems as though they changed how they are accounting things. But they do admit they are hoarding something, but we are unsure if it’s actually a significant amount or if it’s actually a relatively small amount increase that they are hoarding. It’s best to wait for an official transcript to make any conclusions on the matter.


It could look big on paper and not actually be that big if they used the former way of accounting for the raw material. So, it’s like an apples to orange comparison I’d wager.
 
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MondoMega said:
They've got to let it go eventually but I wouldn't be surprised if a few things were still compatible on the original model that far down the track, yeah. Absolutely disagree on full support for the original Switch still going on that far from now, but select titles I can see.
Click to expand...

That's what everyone else is saying here. Same eShop for both, and the least technically demanding titles running on both consoles.
 
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Eclissi said:
If Drake has the shared line up with Switch OG, it will be perceived as a pro version.
Click to expand...

It won't have, at least not at 100%. Unlike the Wii which brought a new type of controllers, I expect the new Nintendo to differentiate itself mostly from its technical abilities; and the expected gap is sufficient to make games infeasible with the current switch. Unless the console is a total flop, I expect developers, Nintendo included, to tap in that potential sooner than later. Sushi Strikers 3 may release on the OG switch in 2028, but Zelda won't.
 
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Rise on PC getting DLSS support is a really weird decision if you take Drake out of the picture.

Of the GPUs that can run DLSS, the RTX 3050 is the viable budget option for current pc builds and it can almost hit 4k60 in rise native at high settings, drop it to medium and it gets approx 4k120.
Rise PC RTX 3050 Performance

So alone that may not seem odd. But Capcom recently dropped next gen patches for their PC resident evil releases that added RTX but no DLSS despite DLSS being designed to counter the fps drops from RTX.

So this tells me a couple of things.

The next gen patches for the RE Titles were console focused and a way of Capcom shining a light on these titles once again.

It's likely that RE7, RE2 Remake and RE3 Remake won't be released for Drake immediately if its holiday 2022. This lines up with the lack of insider chatter about potential ports.

A DLSS patch for these titles could be a precursor for their release on Drake.

Rise Sunbreak is a day and date Drake enhanced title. Judging by RTX 3050 performance native, 4k60fps with DLSS on Drake should be possible.

Drake is launching soon, I am now in the Holiday 2022 camp firmly. Just doesn't make sense for Capcom to patch a PC title with DLSS that already gets high fps at 4k on budget hardware over games that could really use it.
 
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My Tulpa said:
Power jump differentials has nothing to do with how a console is marketed/positioned/utilized.

The Xbox One X has a larger power jump over the Xbox One than the Series S had over the One X

Despite this, the former was utilized as a mid gen pro existing alongside the other models and the latter was utilized as a gen-breaking successor making the One X obsolete.
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Yeah but the key major difference with these pro revisions (xbone X , ps4 pro, etc) vs next gen is that they shared the same CPU to make them compatible with the whole library. A78 is new and leaps ahead of A57. With new generations, we get more modern and powerful CPUs, and they aren't always necessarily so easily backwards compatible.

The A78s are as new as Zen 2s and have just as much of a power gap from A57 as jaguars and Zen 2. Would Drake really be in a "pro model?" in that case?

I have no doubt that Nintendo wants current switch models to last as long as possible, and that they would share the same 1st party games together with Drake and Switch 2.. I've said this before many times, they could follow MS and Sony with how the are treating current and last gen/cross support. Especially PS5 and PS4? PS5 has the same 1st party support at launch, with a few third party exclusives (Dark Souls 3). I believe it was the same for MS consoles.

But that's my two cents. Generation power gap, especially CPU. I'm a firm believer it will be a successor and not a pro model, and with switch models having cross 1st party multiplatform support for 2-3 years at least like the last gen consoles. It might get treated as a pro in the first year or two, but it will have some 3rd party exclusives at launch. Games that were on the cloud on switch have a good chance of getting native on Drake/switch 2.

Wouldn't surprise me if switch gets mk10 released on it with Drake, if it's out in 2024.
karmitt said:
I do too. ¯\(ツ)/¯
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yeah, the only thing that is really guaranteed is eShop support. lol
 
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Just skimming through the last 10 or so pages here, did the "my uncle works at Nintendo" meme finally somewhat come true? xD
 
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ShadowFox08 said:
yeah, the only thing that is really guaranteed is eShop support. lol
Click to expand...

Of course nothings guaranteed for exact titles releasing by 2027. But I personally interpret Furukawa saying as recently as February this year that “Switch is just in the middle of its lifecycle” that the current devices will be just as high of a priority for years to come, getting basically first party support. If we saw exceptions they’d not be Nintendos 15-30 million sellers like Mario.

Worth nothing that 2027 is probably a bad date use as it literally marks 10 years on the market, double the typical 5-6 that Nintendo said they would go beyond, and a fair estimate for what might be the “end point” of the Switch. I’d be looking at that year specifically to be where we see notably less OG Switch support. Really hard to say how they’ll transition to whatever’s next…
 
From the shareholder meeting, might be relevant :

Furukawa: 'We will strengthen contact with each and every customer with a Nintendo Account. Going forward, we will continue to sell three models for Switch and strengthen sales with Xenoblade 3, Splatoon 3, new Pokémon titles and new titles from software manufacturers. Despite the impact of the Corona and semiconductor shortages, we will continue to operate our business while taking the necessary measures."
Click to expand...
 
Ya the only hints we usually get is them avoiding answering a question related to new hardware somehow. And they already sell 3 models of switch atm
 
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