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Furukawa Speaks! We discuss the announcement of the Nintendo Switch Successor and our June Direct Predictions on the new episode of the Famiboards Discussion Club! Check it out here!
StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (New Staff Post, Please read)
- Thread starter Dakhil
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People should pay attention to this post. Some won't like it but....I wrote a long post and then my browser ate it.
The quick (for me) version: DLSS changes the power calculations for the device and I think it’s useful to stop thinking of how much power Drake could have and start thinking about how much power DLSS needs.
Consider the PS 4 Pro and the Xbox One X. Their performances characteristics were dictated by checkerboard rendering. CR requires a bespoke resolution exactly one half of 4K. The PS4 Pro GPU is exactly twice as big as the because that’s the factor by which existing games needed to improve for checkerboard rendering to work.
DLSS doesn’t work that way. DLSS supports multiple possible input resolutions. Quality mode looks better than checker boarding. Performance mode looks a little worse. Neither requires as high an input resolution as checkerboarding. Nintendo can offer a super product at 85% of the power.
DLSS also makes dynamic resolution scaling way less useful or actively broken. DLSS really needs a stable base image to draw from, the whole design is built on the idea that you have performance to spare.
Without DRS, the power gap between the two modes is more important. Zelda’s 900p won’t cut it, you need to get to the base resolution for DLSS to work, and you can’t target one mode and let DRS cover any gaps.
So it’s highly likely Nintendo will try to keep power per natively rendered pixel about the same. For quality mode output, that’s a factor of 3.6. For performance mode its 2.1.
We know from Orin power data that 460Mhz is pushing it in handheld mode from a power draw perspective. We also know from Orin that the likely max clock for Drake is 1.3Ghz. The bottom of Ampere’s power curve is 300Mhz.
So here are our constraints. Nintendo almost definitely wants to target last gen quality as a baseline, and would like to preserve handheld mode battery life.
At 300Mhz, Drake has roughly half the TFLOPS of PS4, and at 720p it is supporting half the resolution. That leaves just enough room to support DLSS quality mode with docked hitting 1Ghz, and at maximum possible Drake battery life. This is pretty close to a best possible situation for Nintendo, and increased Ampere efficiency only encourages this arrangement further.
But perhaps Nintendo wants to leave some GPU room for “ps4 quality visuals with some ray tracing on top.” Or perhaps there are some other performance limitations that push the handheld clocks further. If they get past 370Mhz, DLSS quality mode is no longer on the table without sacrificing some visual features in the docked mode presentation.
Performance mode opens up additional possibilities. You could go as far as battery life would let in handheld mode, and still have plenty of room to stay under the cap. Maybe run a 1080p screen and DLSS to it?
So - Nintendo pushes for more power in handheld mode, only to lose DLSS quality mode in the name of SOC yields. Or goes for quality mode, and cuts handheld mode down to preserve battery life. Neither of these solutions requires PS4 Pro level of pixel pushing.
Expecting Series S performance is absolutely ludicrous. GPU can be scaled down. CPU and the SSD is a no go.
Drake is PS4 games with 4k like visuals = PS4 Pro. Of course some PS5 only games will get downported much like PS4 games downported to Switch. DLSS will greatly help with that and make many more downports possible.
Above all Drake exclusive Nintendo games will look absolutely astonishing compared to most Switch games. Biggest generational leap ever from Nintendo !
Even though I don't want nu-GF (or even worse: ILCA) to poison the best pokemon games ever made (BW/BW2), I think a gen 5 remake/remaster is probably more believable as a follow-up than straight up gen 10.
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It’d be nice if it doesn’t take too long to see some of these. At the very least I hope TotK looks like a significant step up over BotW when played on the new hardware - not just better image quality and framerates.
It’ll look good no matter what, but if they don’t add any other nice bells and whistles on the Drake launch, it’ll probably be at least 5 years before we do see a Zelda that takes advantage of it.
Kevin
Chain Chomp
I really wish there was SOMETHING to suggest this new hardware was actually coming in the first half of 2023. There just isn't anything anymore. No rumors, leaks, nothing and it seems like ALL Nintendo insiders have basically disappeared since the September Direct (no new rumors that I saw from any of them). If this system is suppose to be out by the time Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out then I feel like the rumor mill and leaks should happening right now or at least very soon but so far radio silence. I also maintain that if we do NOT get new hardware by the time Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom releases then we will absolutely not get hardware anytime soon. At least not at all in 2023. No way would Nintendo release Zelda: Tears of the Kindom as a last gen only game and then release new hardware just months later. In my mind the new hardware is either coming early next year or it isn't happening in 2023 which would likely push us into Year 7 or even eventually Year 8 of old ass tired Switch hardware and so far there aren't any good indicators of an early 2023 launch (opinion). It's kind of bumming me out because I'm honestly thinking 2023 is about to come and go and we are all still left just waiting for what feels like a lifetime at this point...
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Raccoon
Fox Brigade
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better lod/draw distance would do a lot on its own
ReddDreadtheLead
#TeamLate2025WithAPotentialForEarly2026
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I seriously don’t understand where y’all are getting this is a series s, and arguing why it’s not going to be a series S, as if anyone argued it’ll be like the series S in every facet.
Alovon11
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The problem is the CPU actually is going to be a pretty good fight against it
Yeah it's weaker, but A78C has higher IPC (and more cache) than the PS5's CPU, so while yeah it won't be clocked high enough to make up the difference still, A78C at clocks expected for that CPU core (There are clock-minimums for the design before you just run into the bottom of the power curve, just like a GPU), it will still be far closer to the PS5/Series S|X CPU than the Last-gen CPUs
Remember, A57 in the OG Switch via its feature support and better IPC can more or less keep up or surpass Jaguar per core despite being at notably lower clocks and having half the cores without SMT.
A78C is a way more mature CPU architecture than A57, like I said, having a higher IPC than Zen2 even, and because the Linux Kernel Update pretty much confirmed it is the C variant, likely that means more Cache than the Ryzen 4000 Derived Series S|X CPUs.
And we have to consider that outside of 120fps modes on Series X or Heavily optimized AMD RT implementations, we likely won't see the Series S|X/PS5 CPUs hit maximum utilization until the very end of the generation, if at all.
So calling CPU the reason Drake is a PS4 with DLSS is asinine when you actually consider the specifications of the console as we can tell and the architectures behind them.
As for the SSD, Drake has a decompression unit in it seemingly based on earlier info in the thread, so that is a major boon for it storage-wise, but yeah, it likely won't reach the highs of Series S|X/PS5....but you have to consider what Developers were intending to design their games around for the next few years, they were only wanting 1 GB/s speed when MSoft/Sony went to them and asked what they'd wanted, so if Nintendo can hit that, they likely will be pretty golden outside of PS5 Games flushing whole levels out of RAM and loading them from Storage in an instant, but Series S|X keeps those games from going to Switch anyway as I don't think they can handle that in the way Sony is touting.
So yeah, Drake is closer/surpasses to Series S when docked unless they do something dumb like clock the GPU below 768MHz, but even if they clock it at 768Mhz, that is 2.35TFLOPs of a uArch that is way more efficient than GCN or even RDNA2 if afforded a good enough process node and is just more efficient outright in memory handling, along with full support for features GCN never had, and guaranteed support for Mesh Shading which PS5 doesn't even have.
Add on DLSS, which can very much go blow to blow against a 4TFLOP GPU that doesn't have dedicated hardware to offset upscaling costs (FSR2.X even if running on Series S has an aggressive cost increase as you increase resolution, so much so DF says it may not be worth it on Series S, meanwhile DLSS can move along just fine)
Will Drake beat the Series S when docked? Mostly depends on how well a developer optimizes/how high Nintendo clocks it, but the idea itself isn't really Ludicrous when looking at the numbers, heck, the main thing Drake needs to worry about is Memory still as even if Ampere is more efficient and can access the A78C's extra cache as it's a Tegra, it still is only limited to around 100GB/s of bandwidth once that Cache is eaten through.
How much a problem that is mainly depends on how much DLSS can offset it by and if they add things like a SysLC or not.
But the main thing is unless Nintendo clocks it at 1.3GHz for the GPU when docked, Drake will never be able to render the same content natively/internally as the Series S, that just ain't happening.
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Everyone hung up on the specs when the real question is if they are going to make the quality of the joycon more bearable. Also fix the damn pro controller while they are at it.
We’re in for this. PS4 games are still beautiful (look at Gow Ragnarok!)
yohoopzcrazy
Cappy
This was a super fun read, thanks for sharing.
This bit:
Makes me wonder if this was intended from the start to accomodate for say, a certain product that will use a "older" generation architecture and be widely adopted by their customers...
Also this paragraph:
Can you imagine showing this to game devs 10 years ago, and telling them this is the current state of gaming as of 2022? lol
Gotdatmoneyy
Boo
The only thinkg I am particularly interested in is what they clock the CPU at. Something like 1.4 GHz would be ideal to show a good upgrade over last generation CPUs
I'm not expecting any change in storage solution and I think expecting current Switch clocks of handheld 307MHz and docked 768MHz is safe (i dont really see how they can clock lower than 307MHz given the power curve).
How much RAM is interesting too I suppose though I think 12GB with 10 GB avaialble to games seems realistic. It's either 8GB or 12GB.
Assuming 8nm process is safe. May be better but pretty sure if that's what current ampere GPUs were fabbed at then its reasonable. (imo this chip is kinda big to fab at 8nm but the new Switch prob wont be the only thing to use it so that could be a reason)
It'll be a pretty nice piece of hardware. Unless they really drop the ball on the CPU I dont see it having huge issues getting some next gen games. Storage speed would be the big issue but I imagine it is something that will just be worked around.
I don't think anyone reasonable expects a handheld system to "secret sauce" a stationary console's performance. This just feels like unnecessary projection.
I think with how hardware is advancing and rendering tricks are evolving, as long as this system hits the minimums devs need for next generation games (which imo really will be on storage speed and CPU) you're not going to be looking at massive visual gulfs between this and a Series S. It will be inferior for sure from an overall standpoint but not like night and day differences.
I'm not expecting any change in storage solution and I think expecting current Switch clocks of handheld 307MHz and docked 768MHz is safe (i dont really see how they can clock lower than 307MHz given the power curve).
How much RAM is interesting too I suppose though I think 12GB with 10 GB avaialble to games seems realistic. It's either 8GB or 12GB.
Assuming 8nm process is safe. May be better but pretty sure if that's what current ampere GPUs were fabbed at then its reasonable. (imo this chip is kinda big to fab at 8nm but the new Switch prob wont be the only thing to use it so that could be a reason)
It'll be a pretty nice piece of hardware. Unless they really drop the ball on the CPU I dont see it having huge issues getting some next gen games. Storage speed would be the big issue but I imagine it is something that will just be worked around.
I don't think anyone reasonable expects a handheld system to "secret sauce" a stationary console's performance. This just feels like unnecessary projection.
I think with how hardware is advancing and rendering tricks are evolving, as long as this system hits the minimums devs need for next generation games (which imo really will be on storage speed and CPU) you're not going to be looking at massive visual gulfs between this and a Series S. It will be inferior for sure from an overall standpoint but not like night and day differences.
if that' older generation was Turing and Ampere desktop/laptop gpus, then definitely. drake definitely wasn't in the discussion for forward compatability
Mr Swine
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“Introducing Switch (blue box) v3 with 64GB storage for $319, coming out in may at the same time as Zelda“
There are like, at least three separate dev studios (ILCA, Tencent, Niantic) currently working on Pokémon spinoffs that primarily build games with Unity at this point. I wouldn't assume Unity is for an internal project unless they're pretty explicit about it.
These games aren't developed linearly like that. Even within Game Freak, there are always multiple projects in development at the same time. By all indications, work on the next generation generally seems to start around when they complete the previous one.
ertaboy356b
Resident Troll
DLSS in handheld mode is the dream. The devs can focus on image quality while dlss brings the game to native resolution.
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I think this brushing off of Drake as not even comparable to Series S is a little pessimistic. We've discussed at length the possible performance of it and I haven't seen predictions below 1TF. While yes, resolution doesn't scale linearly with TF, two games at 1080p output would be rendering internally at around 1080p on Series S and 540p on Drake. That's a quarter the internal resolution... And a quarter the performance. Leaving plenty of space for other things. With the A78C and possibly MORE (if perhaps slower) RAM backing that up, I don't see Drake NOT hitting Series S performance metrics. Just not natively.
This isn't a kneecapped PS4 as a portable, that's what Switch was; the most demanding PS4 games can be blended up and served on Switch to great effect, see Witcher 3 and Nier Automata. Following that I fully expect this to be, at worst, a kneecapped PS5 as a portable. Not talking literally, but in that it can do games the PS4 just couldn't, like the Switch does the Witcher 3 when the Xbox 360 can't.
That said from what we know the performance gap between Drake and PS5 is likely lower than Switch and PS4, so I'd confidently say it sits far closer to Xbox Series S than Xbox One, and that's before we consider that... Well, yeah, it IS going to "secret sauce" it's way into next gen performance at a fraction of the power consumption. That's the point of DLSS... That's the sauce we all know it's gonna be served with.
This isn't a kneecapped PS4 as a portable, that's what Switch was; the most demanding PS4 games can be blended up and served on Switch to great effect, see Witcher 3 and Nier Automata. Following that I fully expect this to be, at worst, a kneecapped PS5 as a portable. Not talking literally, but in that it can do games the PS4 just couldn't, like the Switch does the Witcher 3 when the Xbox 360 can't.
That said from what we know the performance gap between Drake and PS5 is likely lower than Switch and PS4, so I'd confidently say it sits far closer to Xbox Series S than Xbox One, and that's before we consider that... Well, yeah, it IS going to "secret sauce" it's way into next gen performance at a fraction of the power consumption. That's the point of DLSS... That's the sauce we all know it's gonna be served with.
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ReddDreadtheLead
#TeamLate2025WithAPotentialForEarly2026
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For Tegra SOCs, the GPU has access to the CPU cache. Or rather, the hierarchy would be L2>L3>RAM
So GPU has its private L2, but CPU doesn’t seem to have that privacy with the LLC as how I understood it.
I got the info from a dev that works with the Tegras and he said it’s similar to Intel and the SOCs where the graphics has access to the CPU cache. And been present since before Xavier (but can be disabled if exceeds 32GB of memory).
I’d imagine the extra layer, as an SLC, would help to a degree. Or as @Look over there has said before, increasing the L3 cache size from 8 to 12 or even 16MB to help.
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Creatures doesn't assist in those games beyond providing pokemon model assets as far as I know. and three job listings specifically mention Unity (1,2,3). it could be nothing, but their technical artist listings are more broad, mentioning both Unity and Unreal. could be an evaluation thing, but I wouldn't rule it out considering they don't have a Switch game under their belt, so who knows what tools they're using
Hero of Legend
Koopa
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Now are we POSITIVE that Creatures is 100% Nintendo-exclusive and can't touch any other hardware, mobile aside?日本の30 3dゼネラリストの求人
本日の日本での30 3dゼネラリストのトップ求人。プロフェッショナルな人脈を構築することで、キャリアアップにつながります。LinkedInでは、毎日3dゼネラリストに関連する求人が掲載されています。www.linkedin.com
I hope this isn't leading to a rug pull and they announce some non-Nintendo system game. Monster's Unity hires after Xenoblade 3D and subsequent full departure from Nintendo still makes me sweat. :/
We'll have to see what happens with Detective Pikachu 2, but with so many of the spin-off games using Unity at this point (I remembered a fourth studio, Spike Chunsoft), I wouldn't rule out direct interaction with Unity as part of their modelling support role, especially with some of the things we've heard about how the legacy set of models (which seem to still be what most of the spin-offs are using, with the possible exception of New Snap) were managed.
I think supposedly Nintendo has some sort of stake in Creatures, but I don't know how much. Functionally, they're a Nintendo-exclusive studio, and I think it's been more than a decade since they've been credited on something that wasn't Pokémon, specifically.
They own 1/3 of The Pokémon Company. They're not going anywhere.
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i regularly circle back to Imran’s comment back when the Bloomberg article dropped in 2021:
Era post:
Yes, we all know Mochizuki conflated some things in that article, but undoubtedly the 4K kits were real, and Imran was corroborating their existence - not necessarily the release timeframe. At the same time that the article dropped he mentioned he’d heard of enough third parties having kits that something was bound to leak.
We’re over a year out from this now, is it possible for hardware to shift so much in that timeframe that the statement is no longer relevant? This thread has decided that the new device would be wasted on performance bumps, so I’m wondering how we’re choosing to reconcile this.
If you’re answer is “Imran doesn’t know anything” just don’t bother to respond.
Era post:
Yes, we all know Mochizuki conflated some things in that article, but undoubtedly the 4K kits were real, and Imran was corroborating their existence - not necessarily the release timeframe. At the same time that the article dropped he mentioned he’d heard of enough third parties having kits that something was bound to leak.
We’re over a year out from this now, is it possible for hardware to shift so much in that timeframe that the statement is no longer relevant? This thread has decided that the new device would be wasted on performance bumps, so I’m wondering how we’re choosing to reconcile this.
If you’re answer is “Imran doesn’t know anything” just don’t bother to respond.
Creatures is technically not a nintendo exclusive developer. but they also don't have too much of a dev focus until recently. they mainly do TGC, Pokemon models, and art assistance for other media
ReddDreadtheLead
#TeamLate2025WithAPotentialForEarly2026
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Imran doesn’t know anything
I kid
I’m curious about that, maybe someone can ask him about that on his patreon on what he meant by it? And if he meant the OLED or something else? There were devkits released to devs around the time the OLED was revealed, and it was an updated from 6 to 8GB of RAM, which Eurogamer confirmed as well.
Creatures origins are closer associated with Nintendo, and they own a third of the Pokémon company, which brings in a steady flow of cash. I don’t think they’d want that gone lol.
And I don’t see the reason for why they’d even mention next generation hardware if it wasn’t Nintendo related. Microsoft and Sony aren’t going to reveal next gen hardware now since they don’t have anything that can be affordable, enough of a performance upgrade, and worth the R&D when they barely have consoles on the market as is.
and it wouldn’t be for smartphones who have to support legacy hardware, and are a wide-margin, not a specific device.
PC is a nonstarter here since… next ten hardware just got revealed and/ or released.
PedroNavajas
Moblin
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Based on the information we have and past experience. As I told you, I have already seen this and it is exactly the same scenario as I saw with the C2D vs C2Q back in 2006.
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(งᓀ‸ᓂ)งImran doesn’t know anything
I kid
He might not be as tech savvy as you lot, but I doubt he'd infer any sort of resolution and performance bumps from a 2GB bump, nor would his contacts. My current guess is that things haven't really changed since then, but he might have gotten word about most of the projects in the works still just being Switch games. With only a limited view of the games in the works, and without Microsoft blatantly marketing it as a successor, one might have drawn the same conclusion about Series X as well. Even still, I wouldn't want to put my name against a statement like that without some certainty.
Truno
Koopa
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Speaking of Imran, on a thread over on Era, he mentioned that his OG Switch was on its last legs and he was waiting for the Zelda TotK OLED model before upgrading. It seems like he doesn't expect (or is not aware) that a next-gen Switch model will launch before/alongside Zelda next year.
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Alovon11
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Even though the PS5 is pretty much a mutant of Ryzen 3000 (Matisse) and Ryzen 4000 (Renoir)? (IE it has the core layout of Matisse Zen2 but Monolithic, but it has a smaller cache like Renoir)
Zen and how much it loves cache can not be underestimated in how it improves performance, and yeah PS5's ludicrous amount of bandwidth feeding that CPU helps a lot (probably why Spiderman on PC scales so weirdly in relation to CPU's with high amounts of bandwidth feeding them when RT is on). But still the lack of cache really drags it's performance down in games versus other desktop CPUs, not to mention the core design still inheriting Zen2's flaws that got ironed out in Zen3.
ReddDreadtheLead
#TeamLate2025WithAPotentialForEarly2026
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Figures.
2027 it is.
having more RAM can allow for a higher performance though, but he probably read into it the wrong way.
Raccoon
Fox Brigade
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It'd probably be more accurate to say they don't really develop games much anymore. The company was built from the ashes of Ape (aka, the original EarthBound dev) and used to put out games fairly regularly. It's only in the last decade or so where literally their only non-support project was Detective Pikachu.
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Not great, but I’m choosing not to read into it.
He’s not going to say “replace it with new hardware next year” at the risk of spawning a bunch of headlines / clickbait YouTube articles. At least I hope that’s the case …
Truno
Koopa
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Well, he most certainly jumped the gun before when it concerned Switch hardware. If he knew something substantial he would absolutely rake in those headlines and Patreon memberships
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ie. Not waste it on an Era post.
ReddDreadtheLead
#TeamLate2025WithAPotentialForEarly2026
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To be fair, he spoke because other outlets spoke. He wouldn’t speak otherwise.
LoneRanger
Chain Chomp
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I think there may be some journalists/insiders who have some info on next switch hardware but don’t want to spill it out due to being more easy to track their sources and put them in compromise. That is because probably dev kits aren’t available for all developers, including indie ones
IIRC that happened last time in 2016, i think it was leaked through ubisoft employees that were working in first mario+rabbids game.
My expectation is that by some point in january or february we will get a factory leak from bloomberg or nikkei and then in the next weeks we will start hearing reports from various outlets about how they knew of a new switch hardware that is due to be releasing very soon and so on. A few weeks later we will get official announcement from nintendo.
IIRC that happened last time in 2016, i think it was leaked through ubisoft employees that were working in first mario+rabbids game.
My expectation is that by some point in january or february we will get a factory leak from bloomberg or nikkei and then in the next weeks we will start hearing reports from various outlets about how they knew of a new switch hardware that is due to be releasing very soon and so on. A few weeks later we will get official announcement from nintendo.
Homura
Moblin
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You know, at this point I wonder if the real launch title for Switch Drake won't be ToTK, but Detective Pikachu 2.日本の30 3dゼネラリストの求人
本日の日本での30 3dゼネラリストのトップ求人。プロフェッショナルな人脈を構築することで、キャリアアップにつながります。LinkedInでは、毎日3dゼネラリストに関連する求人が掲載されています。
With the way they're talking about it, it sounds like they're aiming for incredibly high-quality graphics, which would be an ideal technical showcase for new hardware.
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If TotK really is just gonna launch with an OLED, then imo Nintendo is going to be forced to release Drake within the year or seriously risk their hardware division. Striking while the iron was ice cold was one of the biggest problems of the Wii -> Wii U transition, and enthusiast spaces are getting more and more exhausted with the 2017 Switch
ReddDreadtheLead
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i’ve already made up my mind that Nintendo is just going to coast and release the hardware whenever they feel like it at this point. And learn nothing from the Wii U.
Truno
Koopa
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Failing to strike the iron while it was hot was the least of Nintendo's problems when they transitioned from the Wii to the Wii U. They outright stopped supporting the Wii and the Wii U was marketed poorly. The Switch is still getting active support and it's still selling 18-20 million units a year. Once Nintendo starts to lower their own forecasts, that's when we can start dooming.
Also, the enthusiast space is a non-issue for Nintendo
DP2 is not high profile enough. Unless Nintendo is launching Drake with Mario later in the year, Zelda is the only known option.
I know people like to say "they don't need to launch with zelda", and to that I ask, why risk it? Did Wii need to launch with Zelda given how it shot out of thr gate? What about Switch? They might not have needed Zelda or they did, but why leave anything to chance? 3DS and Wii U launched with no major game on par with Zelda. Sure they had a myriad of more pressing issues, but Nintendo shouldn't put Drake in the same category, even if it's a minor one.
Drake's gonna launch with a major game, whatever it is
Thugstas
Bob-omb
Forgot some datas. But pretty much good
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Old rumors don't disappear just because nothing new has happened recently.
Thraktor
"[✄]. [✄]. [✄]. [✄]." -Microsoft
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The PS3/Xbox 360 generation isn't really comparable to the current generation in CPU terms, though. The PS3 and Xbox 360 CPUs were very, ahem, idiosyncratic CPUs which had a lot of theoretical performance but required code to be carefully tailored to actually achieve that.
The PS3's Cell CPU in particular is a CPU with massive theoretical performance, but made in such a way that achieving anywhere close to that theoretical performance is very challenging. While people have claimed that it was ahead of it's time in terms of moving to multi-core CPUs, in reality it represented a design philosophy which quickly became obsolete. The PPE was pretty typical of this philosophy, an in-order PowerPC core with a long pipeline and a high clock speed. The 7 SPEs, though, took this to the extreme. The SPEs:
- Were in-order
- Had a long pipeline
- Had no cache
- Had no branch predictor
An 18-cycle mispredict penalty when you don't even have a branch predictor is pretty scary stuff. The recommendation is, pretty much, just not to use branches. For example, on SPEs, the recommended approach for loops was to unroll them. That is, instead of having a standard for loop which iterates, say 100 times, you just duplicate the code 100 times instead, hence avoiding branches and avoiding the branch mispredict penalty.
The lack of cache was another thing that had to be carefully worked around. Each SPE had 256KB of SRAM, and there was a DMA engine to pull in data from main memory, so if you made sure the SPE always had the data it needed in SRAM you'd be okay, but if the SPE ever tried to access main memory the latency would be enormous and the SPE would stall completely until the data arrived.
The first line of the paper is actually quite telling about the design philosophy, as it calls the SPE a "11 FO4 streaming data processor". The phrase FO4 isn't something you hear too often these days about CPU designs, but was arguably the key metric for CPU designers in the early 2000s. FO4 refers to the complexity of each stage in a pipelined processor. A lower FO4 means each stage in the pipeline is electrically simpler, which means signals propagate through them more quickly and therefore you can hit higher clock speeds. Chasing lower and lower FO4 values was the design philosophy of the time, motivated by the notion that you can reach a low enough FO4 to hit optimal theoretical performance. This meant longer and longer pipelines, and the Pentium 4, Xbox 360's Xenos, and PS3's Cell were all products of this design philosophy.
Another popular idea at the time was that compilers (or just software developers) would become smart enough to deal with the most esoteric design, so CPU designers could just focus on theoretical performance and leave it to someone else to figure out how to actually make us of it. Intel's ill-fated Itanium processors, with their VLIW design, were another example of this somewhat earlier than Cell.
And have CPUs since Cell followed it's lead in chasing low-FO4 designs with long pipelines and throwing out useless trinkets like caches and branch predictors? Well, no. In fact, CPU design recently has gone in exactly the opposite direction. The Core 2 Duo was an early example of this, already on the market just before PS3 hit. It's a shorter pipeline design with lower clock speeds than the preceding Pentium 4, but outperformed it in most real-world code, because it was designed around how real-world code would run on it, rather than theoretically optimal code.
If you look at the arguable leader in modern CPU design, Apple, and how they've managed to achieve that level of performance, it's by doing exactly the opposite of what Sony and IBM did with Cell. Rather than pushing long pipelines and high clock speeds, they've got large, low-latency caches, an extremely large re-order buffer for out-of-order execution, and very sophisticated branch prediction. Apple are pushing things a bit more than others in this direction, but this is representative of modern CPU design; try to make as much real-world code run as well as possible, rather than asking developers to contort themselves to reach the chip's theoretical performance.
Getting back to my original point, the Core 2 Duo was designed so that, if you were to just write some typical code without much care for what CPU it would run on, it would outperform the likes of a Pentium 4 or Xenos or Cell. Early games in the PS3/Xbox 360 generation wouldn't have been heavily optimised around the Xenos and Cell CPUs, however if there's one place where software developers get to tightly optimise their code around specific hardware it's the games industry. Over the course of the generation AAA developers were figuring out how to squeeze more and more out of those CPUs, and the likes of the Core 2 Duo wasn't able to keep up with performance you could get out of Xenos or Cell when code was extremely well optimised for them.
The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are in a very different position. Not just because the CPU cores are the same or very similar to those used in many gaming PCs, but because the CPUs aren't weird esoteric designs which take years for developers to properly leverage. Developers will undoubtedly get more out of them over the generation, and as cross-gen games disappear and we see more 30fps current gen exclusives PCs will need more power to hit 60+fps, but it's not going to be anywhere near what we saw in the PS3/Xbox 360 generation.
KeijiKG
Moblin
BW used layered sprites (kinda like Gundam fighting games or Super Robot Wars) and had an active camera on some parts like Castelia City, so a remake would have to do a little more than just adapt the DS game since Gen 5 was pushing 3D a bit harder than Gen 4 was or at least it played with presentation far more than just fixed overhead camera.
A remake would probably have more in common with X/Y in terms of presentation more than it would BDSP.
- Pronouns
- he / him
You can't go from making a point about how CPU won't be close to Series S and then ignore that it also won't be close to PS4, from the other direction. PS4 would have a harder time playing "full Drake" games than Drake would at "full Series S" games.
Angel Whispers
Follow me at @angelpagecdlmhq
I suspect that relative safety will prevail here, too, and we'll have black and perhaps white, or even a light/dark/silver-grey, with the occasional special editions. At a stretch, they might do lots of them, same approach as the (New) 3DS. The colours will remain for the Joy-Con controllers, and if they continue the Switch Lite line. Perhaps plates for the dock. Third party labels might offer customisable options for Pro Controllers. I like the Metallic Blue DSi, and the Fire Emblem Fates New 3DS XL finish, but would imagine the finish will be the same as the existing Switch. Probably. I also hope for a return to the European/Japanese SNES colour-coded action buttons. or at least colour-coded lettering. There's so much that the New 3DS did right, and I hope they look at it again for some product design inspiration.
YolkFolk
Tingle
My Spider-sense is giving me negative vibes.
@NateDrake without adding anything, does your information remain the same?
@NateDrake without adding anything, does your information remain the same?
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