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

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I missed this from a few days ago. Not a significant game from Nintendo for "quite some time" after Tears of the Kingdom....


 
Quoted by: LiC
1
Lancelot said:
Doubting Nintendo is indeed going cutting edge this time is honestly kind of silly, they're intending to carry you for the entirety of Gen 9 with Drake relevant, without the user potentially considering a PS5 or Series X to play those games.
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Oxford English Dictionary defines 'cutting edge' as "at the newest, most advanced stage in the development of something".

Drake by definition is not cutting edge.

Outside of inheriting Orin's AV1 encode support (which is not present on consumer Ampere GPUs) and Orin's Optical Flow Accelerators (OFA) (which I believe are different from the OFA on consumer Ampere GPUs), and having a feature exclusive only to Drake called the File Decompression Engine (FDE), which Nvidia indirectly said is for video games, Drake's GPU, architecturally, is exactly the same as consumer Ampere GPUs, from having the same gen and same type of Tensor cores, to having the same gen RT cores. And Ampere was officially introduced in 1 September 2020, and is the predecessor to Nvidia's current architecture, Ada Lovelace, which was introduced on 20 September 2022. And Ada Lovelace has significantly larger L2 cache, larger Tensor cores (similar to Orin's double-rate Tensor cores?) with added FP8 support, and larger RT cores with more hardware features.

The Cortex-A78 was officially introduced on 26 May 2020. And the Cortex-A78C was officially introduced on 2 November 2020. (Drake's very likely to use the Cortex-A78C for the CPU since Nvidia mentioned that Drake uses 8 CPU cores in a single cluster, and the Cortex-A78C happens to support up to 8 CPU cores per cluster.) The Cortex-A78 is the predecessor to the Cortex-A710, which was officially introduced on 25 May 2021, which also happens to be the predecessor of the Cortex-A715, which was officially introduced on 28 June 2022.

So assuming Nintendo's new hardware equipped with Drake is launching on Q2 2023 (April - June 2023) at the earliest, the CPU and GPU technologies inside Drake is going to be ~2 to ~3 years old (and longer when including R&D).

Is Drake "withered tech"? No.
Is Drake cutting edge? Also no.
Is Drake really advanced technology? Yes.

In some instances, not using cutting edge technology is actually beneficial. The Cortex-A78, for instance, is actually more performant and power efficient compared to the Cortex-A710, regardless of if TSMC's or Samsung's process nodes were used for SoC fabrication. (Unfortunately, there aren't really benchmarks for the Cortex-A715 since the SoCs using the Cortex-A715 launched very recently.)
 
Dakhil said:
Oxford English Dictionary defines 'cutting edge' as "at the newest, most advanced stage in the development of something".

Drake by definition is not cutting edge.

Outside of inheriting Orin's AV1 encode support (which is not present on consumer Ampere GPUs) and Orin's Optical Flow Accelerators (OFA) (which I believe are different from the OFA on consumer Ampere GPUs), and having a feature exclusive only to Drake called the File Decompression Engine (FDE), which Nvidia indirectly said is for video games, Drake's GPU, architecturally, is exactly the same as consumer Ampere GPUs, from having the same gen and same type of Tensor cores, to having the same gen RT cores. And Ampere was officially introduced in 1 September 2020, and is the predecessor to Nvidia's current architecture, Ada Lovelace, which was introduced on 20 September 2022. And Ada Lovelace has significantly larger L2 cache, larger Tensor cores (similar to Orin's double-rate Tensor cores?) with added FP8 support, and larger RT cores with more hardware features.

The Cortex-A78 was officially introduced on 26 May 2020. And the Cortex-A78C was officially introduced on 2 November 2020. (Drake's very likely to use the Cortex-A78C for the CPU since Nvidia mentioned that Drake uses 8 CPU cores in a single cluster, and the Cortex-A78C happens to support up to 8 CPU cores per cluster.) The Cortex-A78 is the predecessor to the Cortex-A710, which was officially introduced on 25 May 2021, which also happens to be the predecessor of the Cortex-A715, which was officially introduced on 28 June 2022.

So assuming Nintendo's new hardware equipped with Drake is launching on Q2 2023 (April - June 2023) at the earliest, the CPU and GPU technologies inside Drake is going to be ~2 to ~3 years old (and longer when including R&D).

Is Drake "withered tech"? No.
Is Drake cutting edge? Also no.
Is Drake really advanced technology? Yes.

In some instances, not using cutting edge technology is actually beneficial. The Cortex-A78, for instance, is actually more performant and power efficient compared to the Cortex-A710, regardless of if TSMC's or Samsung's process nodes were used for SoC fabrication. (Unfortunately, there aren't really benchmarks for the Cortex-A715 since the SoCs using the Cortex-A715 launched very recently.)
Click to expand...
You could absolutely argue Drake is a cutting edge mobile SOC. NVidia doesn’t currently offer anything significantly superior.
 
bmfrosty said:
You don't. What outlook did they have on the project in 2016? We don't know and we won't know.
Click to expand...
All evidence shows that Drake managed to get an engineering sample until April last year, thus it couldn't have been ready by 2021, not by a loooooong shot. It was always a 2023 product, maaaybe it could have launched in 2022 if the pandemic hadn't disrupted everything, but who knows?

Does Andy Robinson really believe that Drake could launch in late 2024 or even 2025? That's quite a stretch. Not that Nintendo couldn't coast but... there is also the point that, why would he KNOW about all big Nintendo games for 2023 or even 2024? Not even Emily is aware of everything, so I wouldn't just go out and say Nintendo has nothing in the works for this and next year aside from Zelda.
 
Concernt said:
I think the audio situation will be pretty uninteresting. PCM surround sound like the current one. Maybe AAC could work, it's broadly supported and of pretty good quality.

If it has a licence fee attached, however, Nintendo's probably not interested. This is the company that wouldn't let the DVD and Blu-Ray drives in the Wii and Wii U (respectively) play DVD or Blu-Ray movies. Or even CDs!

All that said, I find SBC absolutely... Fine. Not incredible, but fine. Switch doesn't do a great job with it. An improved SBC implementation would be just as appreciated as AAC. Both would be stellar.
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3DS had AAC support. The license fee isn't awful, but adding AAC support after the fact probably would have cost Nintendo a lump sum expenditure of something like 100 million dollars to cover every Switch already on the market.

Drake likely has the same audio processing engine as Orin, which is not substantially upgraded from the TX1.
 
kvetcha said:
You could absolutely argue Drake is a cutting edge mobile SOC. NVidia doesn’t currently offer anything significantly superior.
Click to expand...
That's what I was thinking. The GPU architecture may have already existed, but not in that particular form for the purpose we hope to see soon.
 
oldpuck said:
3DS had AAC support. The license fee isn't awful, but adding AAC support after the fact probably would have cost Nintendo a lump sum expenditure of something like 100 million dollars to cover every Switch already on the market.

Drake likely has the same audio processing engine as Orin, which is not substantially upgraded from the TX1.
Click to expand...
For Bluetooth I mean, but yes, other than the possibility of Bluetooth audio improvements or better DAC for the headphone jack, surround sound and spacial capabilities will probably remain the same. Not terrible, really.
 
0
kvetcha said:
You could absolutely argue Drake is a cutting edge mobile SOC. NVidia doesn’t currently offer anything significantly superior.
Click to expand...
I agree, although I will grant that "cutting edge" doesn't have any one meaning. And I think it's pretty analogous to where Tegra X1 was in late 2016 when Nintendo originally planned to launch the Switch, with the main difference being that this seems more likely to be customized for just one customer's use case (which we see evidence of with the FDE). It's maybe a shade more current relative to the Tegra line itself, but about the same in the positioning between architectures.
 
Concernt said:
I think the audio situation will be pretty uninteresting. PCM surround sound like the current one. Maybe AAC could work, it's broadly supported and of pretty good quality.

If it has a licence fee attached, however, Nintendo's probably not interested. This is the company that wouldn't let the DVD and Blu-Ray drives in the Wii and Wii U (respectively) play DVD or Blu-Ray movies. Or even CDs!

All that said, I find SBC absolutely... Fine. Not incredible, but fine. Switch doesn't do a great job with it. An improved SBC implementation would be just as appreciated as AAC. Both would be stellar.
Click to expand...
Yeah, SBC is actually very customizable and can stream transparent audio at the right bitrate.

Audio quality of SBC XQ Bluetooth audio codec - Articles - SoundExpert

Subjective and objective measurements of SBC at high bitrates.. SoundExpert news and articles
soundexpert.org soundexpert.org
 
If there’s an announcement for hardware in H1 2022, tomorrow morning at 6am pt is probably the best chance. Nintendo does like doing things their own way, but with Nvidia GeForce Beyond @ CES at 8am, and the “Primed and Ready” comment… things could line up
 
slsk said:
4K, DLSS and RT could be the "gimmicks" that Nintendo goes with for a successor.

For example, with 4K you can divide the screen into nine 1280*720 segments and use this to support eight player Mario Kart on one 4K screen with one console. And you can have a Super Mario Kart style retro map in the middle of the screen too with the unused segment.

I can also see RT being used for those mirror puzzles (Zelda) and in games like Luigi's Mansion and Bowser's Fury.
Click to expand...
8 divided 720p screens on a 4k tv isn't gonna look so hot.
Personally I'd rather they stick with 4 players and just aim for 60fps in multiplayer, with the highest resolution possible. Framerate seems to always be the first to go when playing multiplayer with more than 2 players of Mario kart.

But LAN should be compatible though, like mk8d and other previous mk games.

LiC said:
We already covered the baseless speculation of these Twitter hacks when it happened.
Click to expand...
Yep..not to mention it's own dedicated thread

famiboards.com

Nintendo might not have a major Switch title after Zelda as they prepare to move on to new hardware

We've been discussing this in the Future Hardware thread, but I figured it could use its own thread. I want to start this by saying it's just a rumor, and we don't really know what's going on with future Nintendo hardware right now. However, this would make sense given how much DLC we're...
famiboards.com famiboards.com
 
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0
Dakhil said:
Oxford English Dictionary defines 'cutting edge' as "at the newest, most advanced stage in the development of something".

Drake by definition is not cutting edge.

Outside of inheriting Orin's AV1 encode support (which is not present on consumer Ampere GPUs) and Orin's Optical Flow Accelerators (OFA) (which I believe are different from the OFA on consumer Ampere GPUs), and having a feature exclusive only to Drake called the File Decompression Engine (FDE), which Nvidia indirectly said is for video games, Drake's GPU, architecturally, is exactly the same as consumer Ampere GPUs, from having the same gen and same type of Tensor cores, to having the same gen RT cores. And Ampere was officially introduced in 1 September 2020, and is the predecessor to Nvidia's current architecture, Ada Lovelace, which was introduced on 20 September 2022. And Ada Lovelace has significantly larger L2 cache, larger Tensor cores (similar to Orin's double-rate Tensor cores?) with added FP8 support, and larger RT cores with more hardware features.

The Cortex-A78 was officially introduced on 26 May 2020. And the Cortex-A78C was officially introduced on 2 November 2020. (Drake's very likely to use the Cortex-A78C for the CPU since Nvidia mentioned that Drake uses 8 CPU cores in a single cluster, and the Cortex-A78C happens to support up to 8 CPU cores per cluster.) The Cortex-A78 is the predecessor to the Cortex-A710, which was officially introduced on 25 May 2021, which also happens to be the predecessor of the Cortex-A715, which was officially introduced on 28 June 2022.

So assuming Nintendo's new hardware equipped with Drake is launching on Q2 2023 (April - June 2023) at the earliest, the CPU and GPU technologies inside Drake is going to be ~2 to ~3 years old (and longer when including R&D).

Is Drake "withered tech"? No.
Is Drake cutting edge? Also no.
Is Drake really advanced technology? Yes.

In some instances, not using cutting edge technology is actually beneficial. The Cortex-A78, for instance, is actually more performant and power efficient compared to the Cortex-A710, regardless of if TSMC's or Samsung's process nodes were used for SoC fabrication. (Unfortunately, there aren't really benchmarks for the Cortex-A715 since the SoCs using the Cortex-A715 launched very recently.)
Click to expand...
It's literally the best SoC you can sell for a 400-450$ price point. "Cutting edge" doesn't always mean that, it's also related to offering the best tech available for a price that you can actually buy. Like... What's the point of arguing this for console hardware? Nvidia literally doesn't have anything better, and nothing will beat a customized SoC made exclusively to play the games they want to make, unlike the "cutting edge" tech that is built with a ton of random bs devs won't use. Just like Drake, PS5 and Series X are cutting edge systems made with the best we had in the time. Even those cutting edge parts you mention were designed one or two years ago, and they won't exist in a bundle designed as powerful and bottleneck-free as Drake.
 
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Kazuyamishima said:
No it doesn't, that would just be called value or budget.
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Maybe for independent parts like GPUs, but not full blown consoles. These are definitely cutting edge as they're not just a GPU, CPU or whatever. They're full blown systems designed with the best that could render games for the time.
 
TonyBaduy said:
All evidence shows that Drake managed to get an engineering sample until April last year, thus it couldn't have been ready by 2021, not by a loooooong shot. It was always a 2023 product, maaaybe it could have launched in 2022 if the pandemic hadn't disrupted everything, but who knows?

Does Andy Robinson really believe that Drake could launch in late 2024 or even 2025? That's quite a stretch. Not that Nintendo couldn't coast but... there is also the point that, why would he KNOW about all big Nintendo games for 2023 or even 2024? Not even Emily is aware of everything, so I wouldn't just go out and say Nintendo has nothing in the works for this and next year aside from Zelda.
Click to expand...

Not going to comment on Andy Robinson specifically, but the number of game leaks that have not really panned out despite near certainty - e.g. Grubb's "Metroid releasing this year" makes me question anything, especially dates. They probably genuinely believe what they're saying perhaps due to historical accuracy of their sources, and maybe their sources do believe what they're reporting, but that doesn't make it true. Nintendo's policies and procedures could be changing by the day around who needs to know, especially in response to prior leaks.
 
karmitt said:
Not going to comment on Andy Robinson specifically, but the number of game leaks that have not really panned out despite near certainty - e.g. Grubb's "Metroid releasing this year" makes me question anything, especially dates. They probably genuinely believe what they're saying perhaps due to historical accuracy of their sources, and maybe their sources do believe what they're reporting, but that doesn't make it true. Nintendo's policies and procedures could be changing by the day around who needs to know, especially in response to prior leaks.
Click to expand...

I completely agree here. When it comes to Nintendo, it's just not worth predicting what we will get or believing in any of the rumors we hear because I feel more often then not, they don't pan out. The Tears of the Kingdom leak does seem real though. I would be surprised if that one doesn't pan out but the other stuff I just don't really want to believe. Now that we are in 2023, I'm hoping we don't have to wait much longer for NIntendo to start talking about the games we are getting this year and whatever their plans are. I want to see Zelda already. Nintendo get me hyped!
 
Lancelot said:
It's literally the best SoC you can sell for a 400-450$ price point. "Cutting edge" doesn't always mean that, it's also related to offering the best tech available for a price that you can actually buy. Like... What's the point of arguing this for console hardware? Nvidia literally doesn't have anything better, and nothing will beat a customized SoC made exclusively to play the games they want to make, unlike the "cutting edge" tech that is built with a ton of random bs devs won't use. Just like Drake, PS5 and Series X are cutting edge systems made with the best we had in the time. Even those cutting edge parts you mention were designed one or two years ago, and they won't exist in a bundle designed as powerful and bottleneck-free as Drake.
Click to expand...
Will be interesting to see what the BOM is. Nintendo did spend a lot of money for raw materials/R&D for Drake (including games), but I think there's a good it will be cheaper than $400 for the parts personally, not including shipping costs. Nintendo should be getting a good deal form Nvidia for the SOC, and if the node indeed ends up being from samsung (hopefully at least 5nm), then Nintendo will more likely get several parts from them like the OLED screen, RAM, UFS Storage from Samsung as well, and for a good deal.

Nintendo doesn't want to lose any more money per console sold, but it will be intriguing to see how they price it. I Maybe they refused to undercut Switch and 1st party games for funding of raw materials/R&D partly for this moment?
 
So are we of sound mind that the big amount of money Nintendo spent on R & D is for Drake parts or was it for the new development building?
 
Quoted by: LiC
1
NintenDuvo said:
So are we of sound mind that the big amount of money Nintendo spent on R & D is for Drake parts or was it for the new development building?
Click to expand...
Paying Nvidia for any contracts would certainly be part of R&D costs. But we really have no way of knowing how much of the past years' R&D expenditure went towards hardware in general, let alone to Nvidia and/or T239 production, since that's a very broad category which includes software development too.

I believe the construction of the new building was not part of the R&D numbers, but I could be misremembering. And in any event, those land purchases only happened in 2022, while the R&D budget has been rising to all-time highs each of the past few years.
 
Nvidia’s not going to announce anything Nintendo doesn’t want them to, and Nintendo isn’t ready to talk about the next Switch yet.

All we’re likely to get out of Nvidia’s presentation is the GeForce 4070 Ti and a bunch of self-driving car/Drive platform talk.
 
Gay Bowser said:
Nvidia’s not going to announce anything Nintendo doesn’t want them to, and Nintendo isn’t ready to talk about the next Switch yet.

All we’re likely to get out of Nvidia’s presentation is the GeForce 4070 Ti and a bunch of self-driving car/Drive platform talk.
Click to expand...
I just want to see if we get something t239 related aka Shield TV 2 (Linux stuff we know)
 
Gay Bowser said:
Nvidia’s not going to announce anything Nintendo doesn’t want them to, and Nintendo isn’t ready to talk about the next Switch yet.

All we’re likely to get out of Nvidia’s presentation is the GeForce 4070 Ti and a bunch of self-driving car/Drive platform talk.
Click to expand...
GeForce is the gaming brand, so I wouldn't expect much car stuff. But you're 100% right that nothing Nintendo-related will ever be revealed (or likely even discussed after the fact) at an Nvidia event like this.
 
If no device using T239 is announced at CES, would it be a good indication of a 2023 release for Switch 2? Even in Q2 with Zelda?

Also, a few random thoughts I had before sleeping.

Even though it'd represent a small percentage of people, a lot of fans would be very disappointed to not hear about new hardware when such a huge, very anticipated game is about to release. It's the sequel to what is considered to be one of the best games of all time, it's not only a big release but even more than that, especially for Nintendo themselves.
It seems obvious we'll see many reactions like "the game sounds like the best Zelda ever made but it's still limited by very old hardware, such a bummer", actually we're already seeing them, and technical analysis from DF and such would only emphasize the - inevitable - issues imo.

So let's say we don't hear anything on new hardware and it releases on current Switch, with the OLED special edition coming as usual, which is what some people (including me) are expecting now.
Once they eventually reveal this new generation Switch, wouldn't the frustration be even worse for Zelda fans overall, and even for a bigger percentage of people?
I can definitely see whole lot of reactions like "oh, that sure sounds nice and Zelda should run/looks great but I've already completed the game and know everything, I wish I could have played the game directly on new hardware in May 2023", even though there would obviously be other great releases and a big one during launch (like a new 3D Mario).

This is even more true is the thing is coming later in 2023, like "why did they wait AFTER Zelda???", or early 2024 but this probably can't be avoided and, in my opinion, something Nintendo might not want and/or be afraid of.
Whatever the reason for a release after Zelda is, I'm sure it's not something Nintendo ever wanted and they'll have to deal with legitimate backlash.

On another note, I'm also thinking of the upcoming total closure of the Wii U & 3DS eShops at the end of March.
Is there any way this might coincide with new hardware coming soon? I'm not sure if there's a precedent on this (like Wii shop closing right before Switch launch).
Of course the new generation Switch should be BC and share the same eShop except from exclusive games so it's probably going to be a smooth transition, but I can see Nintendo wanting to get ride of previous generations and clearing their offer to only include the Switch brand everywhere and keeping it simple : Switch first gen (3 models), Switch 2/Ultra/Super/Next (choose your destiny).
 
L_esson said:
If no device using T239 is announced at CES, would it be a good indication of a 2023 release for Switch 2? Even in Q2 with Zelda?

Also, a few random thoughts I had before sleeping.

Even though it'd represent a small percentage of people, a lot of fans would be very disappointed to not hear about new hardware when such a huge, very anticipated game is about to release. It's the sequel to what is considered to be one of the best games of all time, it's not only a big release but even more than that, especially for Nintendo themselves.
It seems obvious we'll see many reactions like "the game sounds like the best Zelda ever made but it's still limited by very old hardware, such a bummer", actually we're already seeing them, and technical analysis from DF and such would only emphasize the - inevitable - issues imo.

So let's say we don't hear anything on new hardware and it releases on current Switch, with the OLED special edition coming as usual, which is what some people (including me) are expecting now.
Once they eventually reveal this new generation Switch, wouldn't the frustration be even worse for Zelda fans overall, and even for a bigger percentage of people?
I can definitely see whole lot of reactions like "oh, that sure sounds nice and Zelda should run/looks great but I've already completed the game and know everything, I wish I could have played the game directly on new hardware in May 2023", even though there would obviously be other great releases and a big one during launch (like a new 3D Mario).

This is even more true is the thing is coming later in 2023, like "why did they wait AFTER Zelda???", or early 2024 but this probably can't be avoided and, in my opinion, something Nintendo might not want and/or be afraid of.
Whatever the reason for a release after Zelda is, I'm sure it's not something Nintendo ever wanted and they'll have to deal with legitimate backlash.

On another note, I'm also thinking of the upcoming total closure of the Wii U & 3DS eShops at the end of March.
Is there any way this might coincide with new hardware coming soon? I'm not sure if there's a precedent on this (like Wii shop closing right before Switch launch).
Of course the new generation Switch should be BC and share the same eShop except from exclusive games so it's probably going to be a smooth transition, but I can see Nintendo wanting to get ride of previous generations and clearing their offer to only include the Switch brand everywhere and keeping it simple : Switch first gen (3 models), Switch 2/Ultra/Super/Next (choose your destiny).
Click to expand...
Pokemon is Nintendos biggest franchise and they let Scarlet and Violet release in it's terrible state so I doubt Nintendo really cares about the "backlash" or negative talk surrounding and regarding TOTKs release because of dated hardware
 
0
LiC said:
GeForce is the gaming brand, so I wouldn't expect much car stuff. But you're 100% right that nothing Nintendo-related will ever be revealed (or likely even discussed after the fact) at an Nvidia event like this.
Click to expand...
Imo its not impossible T239 will be there, in a non Nintendo product.
 
IMO, Samsung 5 nm is not an option as Nvidia has not purchased any wafer supply for it. Nvidia only has deals with Samsung for 8 nm (since 2020) and 3 nm (from 2024 onwards). These deals cost a lot of money and are announced to investors years in advance.
 
Got lotsa contact with friends and family over the holidays, some of which got a Switch recently. Even the tech-savvy ones are mighty impressed with it - especially how versatile and stable it all is. They don't really long for an upgrade (only playing Animal Crossing, Splatoon 3 and Mario Kart definitely helps giving the impression that Switch isn't showing it's age =P ).

My point is: Nintendo has been absolutely right in milking this for as long as they have.

karmitt said:
Not going to comment on Andy Robinson specifically, but the number of game leaks that have not really panned out despite near certainty - e.g. Grubb's "Metroid releasing this year" makes me question anything, especially dates. They probably genuinely believe what they're saying perhaps due to historical accuracy of their sources, and maybe their sources do believe what they're reporting, but that doesn't make it true. Nintendo's policies and procedures could be changing by the day around who needs to know, especially in response to prior leaks.
Click to expand...
The amount of times "it'll totally happen this time" didn't happen the past years is kinda staggering. It's really helped me come to terms with leakers in general, namely fun to consider, but only believe it when I see it =P . That being said, the holidays could've really used a Zelda remaster or Metroid remake because 2022 kinda sucked on Switch for me personally.

The boring explanation for insiders missing the mark so much lately is probably that timing is in such a flux since Covid, stuff gets shuffled all the time.

the tin-foil explanation is that the ninjas have been baiting leakers to get to their sources

Herb Alpert said:
OK, I finally bought that damned Oled.

Now expect news about a new model quite quickly.

Don't thank me for my sacrifice.
Click to expand...

I was intensely disappointed when it got announced, but it fixed almost all of my niggles with the launch Switch. More sturdy, sleeker, fantastic screen, great kickstand. Looking at ye olde Switch is painful in comparison, and I upgraded my laptop and computer monitor because of how great that OLED looks.
 
Concernt said:
Occam's Razor says no, thanks be to God. The simplest answer is this chip is for Nintendo.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's unlikely. Although in this case I would still assume the chip was designed for Nintendo, and that any other use-cases would just be a case of Nvidia finding extra customers for a chip they're making anyway.

Realistically, by far the most likely announcement we'll get from Nvidia is the RTX 4080 12GB RTX 4070Ti and maybe a couple of other Ada GPUs.

bmfrosty said:
I think the original concept for NX would have had Mariko upclocked at release in 2019 and a newer SoC (Drake) in 2021. Repeat as long as it works.

I don't think that the new management had the political will to follow through on 2019 and the "chip shortage" made Drake hard to manufacture in large, reliable quantities well enough to make the new management follow through.
Click to expand...

Possibly, although I do think that a release cadence of every two years may have been too much for developers. By 2021, devs would need to support 6 different performance profiles (2 each on the original Switch, Mariko and Drake).

slsk said:
IMO, Samsung 5 nm is not an option as Nvidia has not purchased any wafer supply for it. Nvidia only has deals with Samsung for 8 nm (since 2020) and 3 nm (from 2024 onwards). These deals cost a lot of money and are announced to investors years in advance.
Click to expand...

The bolded isn't usually true. Nvidia announced pre-payments to TSMC a year or two back, because they were making large payments and had to explain them to investors, but pre-payments are unusual (and less likely in the future as the chip shortage dies down). Furthermore, Nvidia never actually specified what they were pre-paying for, just that they were pre-paying TSMC for some future capacity. Media reported 5nm, because it was an obvious deduction (backed by leaks), but it wasn't something announced by Nvidia in advance. Use of Samsung 3nm is also something which Nvidia hasn't commented on, at the moment it's only a rumour/leak, and it's unlikely Nvidia will make any comment until they release a chip on it.

Leaks, however, do usually happen, and the lack of any kind of leak or credible rumour about Nvidia using Samsung 5nm/4nm is a mark against it. Though, the biggest argument against Samsung 5nm or 4nm is that no other Nvidia product is using it. Hopper and Ada are on TSMC 4N, with Grace almost certainly to follow, Orin is on Samsung 8N, and they have a couple of networking (former Mellanox) products on TSMC N7/N6.
 
manfromthedam said:
Got lotsa contact with friends and family over the holidays, some of which got a Switch recently. Even the tech-savvy ones are mighty impressed with it - especially how versatile and stable it all is.
Click to expand...
they should thank nintendo for adding so much stability to the device over the years.
 
Daily reminder that the only cutting edge thing the other two (3?) consoles had at the time was barely the GPU. And for one, it was the blistering fast SSD that wasn’t matched.

One has a Frankenstein creation and is based on an older architecture with an optimization to let it clock higher and Ray Tracing hardware (that’s it).

And the other mostly follows the GPU of the year it released feature wise, minus the layout and structure which is based on the predecessor.


Both(well all three) had the older CPU by the time of release with modifications that had lower cache and in one case, a cut down FPU.



Consoles aren’t really going to be that cutting edge anymore, not like the PS3 or 360, too expensive as evident these days. They’ll be new enough for the market to make use of, for devs to be familiar enough with, and have easier time of development. As long as it’s good enough, things should be fine. That’s all people should focus on rather than if it’s cutting edge. Not old like a sack of potatoes but new enough and good enough to get work done.



but let’s also remember, your hardware is pathetically and utterly useless if it has nothing that can work with it. 😂 (over-exaggerated but the point is the same).

Not directed at you Dakhil, more just adding to it in a different way since people care about cutting edge in comparison to others rather than by itself in isolation.


Dakhil said:
Oxford English Dictionary defines 'cutting edge' as "at the newest, most advanced stage in the development of something".

Drake by definition is not cutting edge.

Outside of inheriting Orin's AV1 encode support (which is not present on consumer Ampere GPUs) and Orin's Optical Flow Accelerators (OFA) (which I believe are different from the OFA on consumer Ampere GPUs), and having a feature exclusive only to Drake called the File Decompression Engine (FDE), which Nvidia indirectly said is for video games, Drake's GPU, architecturally, is exactly the same as consumer Ampere GPUs, from having the same gen and same type of Tensor cores, to having the same gen RT cores. And Ampere was officially introduced in 1 September 2020, and is the predecessor to Nvidia's current architecture, Ada Lovelace, which was introduced on 20 September 2022. And Ada Lovelace has significantly larger L2 cache, larger Tensor cores (similar to Orin's double-rate Tensor cores?) with added FP8 support, and larger RT cores with more hardware features.

The Cortex-A78 was officially introduced on 26 May 2020. And the Cortex-A78C was officially introduced on 2 November 2020. (Drake's very likely to use the Cortex-A78C for the CPU since Nvidia mentioned that Drake uses 8 CPU cores in a single cluster, and the Cortex-A78C happens to support up to 8 CPU cores per cluster.) The Cortex-A78 is the predecessor to the Cortex-A710, which was officially introduced on 25 May 2021, which also happens to be the predecessor of the Cortex-A715, which was officially introduced on 28 June 2022.

So assuming Nintendo's new hardware equipped with Drake is launching on Q2 2023 (April - June 2023) at the earliest, the CPU and GPU technologies inside Drake is going to be ~2 to ~3 years old (and longer when including R&D).

Is Drake "withered tech"? No.
Is Drake cutting edge? Also no.
Is Drake really advanced technology? Yes.

In some instances, not using cutting edge technology is actually beneficial. The Cortex-A78, for instance, is actually more performant and power efficient compared to the Cortex-A710, regardless of if TSMC's or Samsung's process nodes were used for SoC fabrication. (Unfortunately, there aren't really benchmarks for the Cortex-A715 since the SoCs using the Cortex-A715 launched very recently.)
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Gay Bowser said:
Nvidia’s not going to announce anything Nintendo doesn’t want them to, and Nintendo isn’t ready to talk about the next Switch yet.

All we’re likely to get out of Nvidia’s presentation is the GeForce 4070 Ti and a bunch of self-driving car/Drive platform talk.
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It’s not so much that, it’s that if Nvidia announces a new product in general that happens to use a new custom Tegra that is ampere-based then we can no longer infer and know when the next Nintendo switch model will release. It could release this year, next year or the year after. Manufacturing as an indicator would be out the window.


If Nvidia does not announce any new product at CES 2023 that uses a tegra with ampere based whatever, we already have an idea of what year the new switch is likely to land on. If they don’t announce anything, then it’s very highly likely 2023 because of how everything is lining up from the hardware slide and the software side for a 2023 release year. Any later would mean something catastrophic happened that caused an unforeseen delay.
 
Thraktor said:
Though, the biggest argument against Samsung 5nm or 4nm is that no other Nvidia product is using it.
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Did Nvidia have anything on the 20nm process when they announced the Tegra X1? The Maxwell based cards at the time would have been 28nm but the Tegra X1 was on 20nm, maybe this is similar where Orin/Ampere is on 8nm while the mobile variant gets moved to 5nm?
 
Truno said:
Digital Foundries' comments, NateDrake's confusing statements, the prediction of no major releases after TotK, and this back-to-back would probably kill this thread
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Nah it would at least explain what's going on with T239 being ready so much early than (supposedly) Nintendo. Most of us are more interested in finding out what's going on then we are invested in something launching soon
 
Skittzo said:
Nah it would at least explain what's going on with T239 being ready so much early than (supposedly) Nintendo. Most of us are more interested in finding out what's going on then we are invested in something launching soon
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Very true. Personnally, as I stated several times, I don't care that much about the hardware release date (even though TotK on Switch is a bummer to me), I'm mostly interested about some clarification, actual leaks or any other substantial info and, ovbiously, the officiel reveal of the thing. Then I won't mind to wait.
 
Goodtwin said:
Did Nvidia have anything on the 20nm process when they announced the Tegra X1?
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Nope.


Goodtwin said:
The Maxwell based cards at the time would have been 28nm but the Tegra X1 was on 20nm, maybe this is similar where Orin/Ampere is on 8nm while the mobile variant gets moved to 5nm?
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it’s still probably 8nm. Best assume that and prepare thyself.
 
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