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

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Sol said:
Could the 8" display be an indication that Nintendo is using an old Samsung fabrication node for this device?

Larger, less efficient SoC, requires more cooling, larger battery to hit targets, etc.....hence the need to create a larger housing therefore requiring a larger display?
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It’s been brought up but I’m personally of the opinion it still would be too big
 
chocolate_supra said:
☝️ Either of these would blow my mind
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To be clear, I actually do think it would be a big mistake :)

Super Famicom styling (which I know you’ve brought up before) they might be able to get away with as a secondary color scheme, but it would still be better suited for a limited edition.

Edit: I’m very curious to see where the color scheme lands. It’s been 7 years of the neon blue and red now as the standard.
 
karmitt said:
To be clear, I actually do think it would be a big mistake :)
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If it were the "main" color, I agree. But as an option, I'd love it. I've pretty much decided I'm gonna reskin my Drake in atomic purple with aftermarket shells anyway so if Nintendo makes it easy on me and let's me buy an official one that'd be nice. 😅

karmitt said:
Super Famicom styling (which I know you’ve brought up before) they might be able to get away with as a secondary color scheme, but it would still be better suited for a limited edition.
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I think this'd be even less likely than atomic purple actually, even though it'd be rad as hell
 
glad to hear 8nm is likely not back on the menu. though it makes you wonder if it could be on something cheaper than 4N (one of the Samsung ones?) to bring the cost down. the chip would end up being larger than it would on 4N but with enough space to house it all given the increased size of the system.

best case & likely scenario - 4N is used and the system being slightly larger allows for ample cooling so it can run decent clocks in handheld - necessary if the screen is going to be 1080p & targeting 1080/60 for handheld mode. though DLSS could be needed to get more demanding third party titles up to 1080/60. either that or developers turn down the settings enough - thinking of things like GTA6 here.
 
Foltzie said:
Would it be weird to tape out T239 alongside a bunch of other chips on 4N and yet use an 8nm node?
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T239’s timing lands along with Orin on 8nm and Ada on 4N. So I’m not sure. What’s most interesting to me is that the 4090 team worked on the electrical validation of T239, which seems indicative.

Ultimately, I just don’t see how the leaked chip fits on 8nm
 
Sol said:
Could the 8" display be an indication that Nintendo is using an old Samsung fabrication node for this device?

Larger, less efficient SoC, requires more cooling, larger battery to hit targets, etc.....hence the need to create a larger housing therefore requiring a larger display?
Click to expand...
Save on the SoC, but spend more on cooling, screen, battery, and even shipping as the console will be bigger and heavier. I don't think it's worth it.
 
OctoSplattack said:
Dring was the first one say it, but Robinson was among those who echoed the statement.
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Dring, Robinson, and another journalist (forgot her name atm) seemingly got their “Nintendo has no big games” and “Microsoft has no marketing money” talking points from ESA and/or ReedPop around the time words got out that both companies wouldn’t participate in E3. In retrospect, these were self-serving excuses by the ESA/ReedPop to distract observers from their failings. Even if some might not consider Pikmin 4 a “huge” title, the Super Mario Bros Wonder and Princess Peach solo showcase certainly are as major as they go.
 
Νεφέλωμα said:
If it isn't clunky, a separate app (that maybe could boot the Switch OS but not visibly) to play your digital Switch games doesn't sound so bad. And they could make the app icon glow if you insert an Switch cartridge or something. I would find this more elegant that just having everything on the homescreen.
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I want everything on my home screen!

I don't care if an indie game was purchased on OG Switch or Switch 2, it's in my digital library and it deserves the same real estate as any other game.

I don't want a section for Switch 1 games, then in 8 years a section for Switch 2 games.
I want just one library with all my games, maybe with a little icon indicating if it runs natively or through a compatibility mode.

They should envision a platform like Steam by now, just a service to build and run your digital library.

Games not supported on your current device would not appear on the eShop and would appear disabled in your library.
Or maybe you just run them through cloud if you have NSO.

Nintendo better nail this, because those Steam handhelds are looking more and more appealing.
 
oldpuck said:
T239’s timing lands along with Orin on 8nm and Ada on 4N. So I’m not sure. What’s most interesting to me is that the 4090 team worked on the electrical validation of T239, which seems indicative.

Ultimately, I just don’t see how the leaked chip fits on 8nm
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it fits in my heart❤️

No but seriously, since ORIN was taped out years before the 40 series even came out to the market, and been in sampling for a few years, it also coincides with the time which T239 was in development.

as in, 2018/2019 ORIN was about done, 2020 T239 starts.

2022 H1, Ada is taped out along with T239(speculation).

H2, Ada releases.

I do have some qualms though with the tape out of T239, and it is that while it isn’t exactly cheap it’s not unheard of to have more than one during the development process.
 
OctoSplattack said:
Dring was the first one say it, but Robinson was among those who echoed the statement.

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Whatever, it's a tweet. So many people don't seem to understand the Pyramid of Reporting.
  • At the bottom of reliability is YouTube, unknown forum posts, unverified Reddit, etc. The "my uncle works at Nintendo" tier.
  • In the middle is tweets from reliable people. Andy would be here. These are personal twitter accounts of reliable people, not published stories. It's not reporting.
  • At the top are reports, like Andy's on VGC earlier this week. Proper journalism, almost certainly sourced via multiple people (there are caveats, of course, surrounding the reliability of the outlet - VGC and Eurogamer are, of course, reliable).
It's annoying to see so many "the same Andy who tweeted this!?" posts in response to a published piece. More people need to understand that personal twitter accounts are not where folks are putting their sourced reporting. Of course, any of these can be wrong, but the point is that if Andy felt overly confident in [X] rumour or opinion, he'd write an article about it.
 
I mean if we are going to be digging through older tweets (on the Nintendo matter) and using it as a gotcha or as a way to invalidate someone who reports things, then I don’t think there’s really a point in A) discussing the reported current article and B) being selective with this because it fits our narrative or idea of what we want.

We’d basically be in a position where there’s literally no real news to discuss until someone other than, checks notes, Andy Robinson or even Nate posts.

It would be hypocritical in a sense.



Of course there’s a grey area of “I want to talk about this because it’s still a rumor that would be better than what we’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks (nothing) to get the thread moving again. I yearn for the rumor mill to turn”
 
fwd-bwd said:
So I managed to get past the Nikkei paywall and accessed their report on Nintendo’s Q1 financial results. They had some exclusive quotes from Furukawa that aren’t available on other news outlets. I can’t share the whole article, but will post a few segments below (machine translation with some manual edits by me).


“The fact that Zelda sales have grown so much in such a short period of time is beyond our imagination.” Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa, interviewed by the Nikkei Shimbun on the [earnings release] day, did not hide his surprise.


Despite the historically strong performance of the April-June quarter, President Furukawa said, “It was unusual for a record-breaking software hit to coincide with the release of a movie. It’s too early to determine the momentum for the entire year.”


Market interest has shifted to the [Switch] successor. Regarding the release timing of the successor, President Furukawa said, “I can’t talk about it at this time,” but “many people are of the opinion that it will be announced in 2024,” said Masahiro Ono of Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities.


Nintendo intends to actively utilize the “Nintendo Account” to carry on the momentum of the Switch to the next-generation console. […] It is expected that the membership information will be made available on the successor, so that the initial setup and game download purchases can be performed smoothly. President Furukawa said, “I can’t speak to the specificity, but it is important to continue the relationship with our customers, which was reset each time we developed a new game console.”
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yeah 2024 and BC seems all but confirmed
 
Thraktor said:
On the subject of new game card formats, I've done a little bit of digging and found what I believe to be the prime candidate for the tech behind the next gen game cards; single-gate vertical channel (SGVC) 3D NAND. In 2017 Macronix published a paper on the technology, including results on a test chip they had manufactured. I don't have access to the paper itself, but the abstract is pretty informative:



There are a few important things here. It's got very long data retention (40+ years), is described as "very suitable for read-intensive memory", and achieves high capacities at low cost. The sample chip they manufactured was 128Gb (16GB) on a 16-layer process, and they claim that 1Tb (128GB) chips would be possible on a 48-layer process at low cost. It could presumably scale even further in capacity with additional layers.

That seems like a technology pretty much perfectly designed for Nintendo. In fact this article about it stated it was "suitable for read-intensive applications such as game-grade memory". I don't know if this is a quote from Macronix or the author's addition, but it would be surprising if Macronix didn't see this as something they could provide to Nintendo.

In 2019, this article stated that Macronix planned to introduce SGVC after their ordinary (GAA-based) 3D NAND business is established. That's taken a bit longer than expected, but they started mass production of 48-layer GAA 3D NAND in 2021 and 96-layer in 2022. Which would put the introduction of SGVC 3D NAND at right around the right time to be used for Nintendo's new console.

Incidentally, it appears that Macronix have been using a mix of XtraROM and NAND in Switch game cards all along. Thanks to @LiC who passed the info along to me. Game cards up to 4GB seem to use XtraROM, while cards 8GB and up use NAND. No specifics on the NAND, but presumably it's tweaked in some way to provide better longevity in a write-once use-case. I don't know whether they're using any 3D NAND, but that's only been available from Macronix recently, so anything prior to last year would have to be planar NAND.

This also explains why development on XtraROM ceased after they hit 32nm in 2014, as they switched to a NAND variant. The 4GB capacity of the largest XtraROM parts is the same as the largest 3DS games (although they claimed 8GB, I don't think any games actually used 8GB cards), so it seems like 4GB is the limit of capacity on 32nm XtraROM.
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GigaUltraMoon said:
Not use it to its absolute fullest potential visually - the thought of the next Zelda or Xenoblade looking like Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima or the Outer Worlds makes me giddy
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That's definitely a real possibility, yeah. Everything that was ever released for the PS4/XOne should run on this hardware with improvements as long as they're made, and if you're well versed with the technical kings of the last generation... I suppose you can imagine that'd be a hard level to keep for the entirety of their output. In summary, expect it to be way more underutilized than the Switch on a regular basis, Nintendo is finally leaving potato territory with all that means.
 
Dark Cloud said:
He doesn’t know shit. Haven’t you noticed he never says anything until others bring up a rumor nowadays? $399 has been said by so many people speculating.
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crazy people give him the time a day after getting the SNES remake last direct 100% wrong
 
0
theguy said:
just for fun: what’s potentially the worst thing people think nintendo could do with the switch 2?
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duracell-aa.jpg
 
theguy said:
just for fun: what’s potentially the worst thing people think nintendo could do with the switch 2?
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dont diferenciate Switch for it sucessor, meaning, make everyone trough Switch sucessor is a Switch Pro or whatever, repeat the same mistakes they did with Wii U
 
supmo said:
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Looks like this paper contains the quote @Thraktor mentioned, "The robust read disturb and long retention at fresh state makes the SGVC device very suitable for the highly read-intensive memory applications such as game-grade memory."

I read the whole thing despite understanding none of the science. It also discusses how self-refreshing or wear levelling is not needed to maintain reliability even after more extreme read cycle tests than other 3D NAND can withstand. And their "ballpark" figure for the cost of a 125 GB chip is less than $5 (a 1 Tbit chip with cost per GByte less than 4 cents), though that's based on various assumptions about manufacturing costs and the like from 2017.

Some specs:

Capture.png


I don't know how much can be made of this table. The voltages and packaging info look basically the same as current Switch game cards, but I assume those are more or less standard and not done that way on purpose because of the (potential) connection to Nintendo.
 
So if 512 GB of storage is an option being considered, I'm assuming that type is already decided first, before capacity.
It's been strongly implied by others, but for the readers, I'll write out my take:

Try to find 512 GB eMMC.
Going by their respective websites, Samsung tops out at 256, Micron at 128, and SK Hynix at 64. Googling "eMMC 512 gb" does return me a result from Mouser, but if you look up the given part #'s, you'll probably see that they're 64 GB on Micron's site (I say probably because I only looked at the first entry that came up). That tells me that despite Mouser listing uppercase GB, it's actually gigabit; shame on you, Mouser.

It all strengthens the scenario of eUFS as internal storage, on top of what Thraktor's already pointed out about how mobile devices at large are shifting away from eMMC.

---

Alright, now for more tangential crap that I really wanted to throw out there this week. If you just want more Nintendo, skip on ahead to the next post. This is really more thinking about... let's say the competitive landscape.

Continuing from this (...this was my previous post!?)...
Look over there said:
(as usual, some more not-exactly Nintendo related/tangential stuff)
squints
Waaaait, in Samsung's announcement of GDDR7, the density is 2 GB?
I'm not saying that we're locked into a cursed timeline just yet, but rewind back a bit to GDDR6's debut. Samsung entered that by announcing 2 GB chips as well. Then followed up on that by also announcing 1 GB chips. And as we know, to this day, GDDR6 is only manufactured as 1 and 2 GB chips :mad:

(someone please announce densities higher than 2 GB soon, because I'm not ready for the internet response to a ~2024 class of GPU launches only having access to GDDR7 chips no denser than 2 GB)

(do I want to even entertain the cursed timeline where we don't get a decent bump in density for GDDR7 in time for ~2028?)
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Follow up: last week, Micron put up their DRAM roadmap for the near future.

2024: Micron's announcing big DDR5 modules for datacenters, as well as 2 GB and 3 GB GDDR7 chips aiming for up to 32 GT/s.

2025: Micron states plans for even bigger DDR5 modules for datacenters. No update on GDDR7; but that's ok, because the 2024 class of GPUs will most likely take their time as usual and use this year to roll out the rest of their lineups.

2026: Micron is willing to say 'expect HBM Next' this year. Micron... did not say anything about GDDR7 for this year. That does not necessarily exclude any improvements to GDDR7 in time for the 2026 class of GPUs, but you can see what the worst timeline could look like.

Things seem to be getting busy these days, so I won't go super long on this just yet (...or so I say <.<). Instead, I'll list some data. I've no doubt that a fair amount of us can cook up projections of the future based off existant information.

PS5: 256-bit bus width. Eight 2 GB GDDR6 chips for a total of 16 GB of memory. Bandwidth of 448 GB/s suggests that the chips are running at 14 GT/s. (divide bandwidth by the (bus-width converted to bytes))
(I am trying to nudge you, the reader, in the direction of wondering, if there is a PS5 Pro as rumored, what would it try to accomplish, and what is the path to get there?)

Series S: 160-bit bus width. Five 2 GB GDDR6 chips for a total of 10 GB of memory. Or, divided into 8 and 2. Regardless, 224 GB/s divided by 16 equals 14 and 56 GB/s divided by 4 equals 14. All the chips are running at 14 GT/s.

Series X: 320-bit bus width. This is weirdly a mix of 1's and 2's. Six 2's, four 1's. Looking at the wiki entry's numbers... ok, I think I got it. The 560 GB/s figure works out if it's the full 320-bit bus width running at 14 GT/s. The 336 GB/s figure checks out for 192-bit bus widthrunning at 14 GT/s. So it seems like the six 2 GB chips are like, logically split in half.

RX 7000 series: Navi 33 looks like it tops out at 384-bit? So twelve chips. 20 GT/s. Navi 31 (well, just the RX 7600) is 128-bit/four chips, 18 GT/s.

RX 6000 series: Navi 21 tops out at 256-bit? So 8 chips. There's 16 and 18 GT/s chips used. Navi 22 tops out at 192-bit/6 chips? Again, 16 and 18 GT/s chips used. Navi 23 tops out at 128-bit/4 chips? 14, 16, and 17.5 GT/s chips used. Navi 24 is 64-bit/2 chips. 16 and 18 GT/s chips used.

RTX 40 series: AD102 is 384-bit? 21 GT/s (it's GDDR6X all the way down to AD106, I guess). AD103 is 256-bit; 22.4 GT/s used. AD104 is 192-bit; 21 GT/s used. Both AD106 and AD107 are 128-bit? The 4060 TI uses 17 GT/s GDDR6, while the 4060 uses 16 GT/s.

RTX 30 series: Huh, interesting mistake on the table for the GT/s column over at wikipedia. The numbers for the SKUs that GDDR6X are halved; so someone put in the clock frequency instead of the transfer rate. Alright, if it's 19, 19.5, or 21 GT/s, the particular SKU's using GDDR6X. If it's 14 or 15 GT/s, it's standard GDDR6.
GA102 is 384-bit; the SKUs use all three transfer rates I mentioned for 6X. GA104 is 256-bit; The 3070 uses 14 GT/s chips. The 3060 TI actually has variations of both 14 GT/s and 19 GT/s. GA106 is 192-bit; the 3060 uses 15 GT/s and 3050 uses 14 GT/s. GA107 is 128-bit.
 
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D36 said:
Thoughts?

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It's too much of a reach. Wouldn't take it as anything more than buzz words in a job listing. Even the part with the 'latest techniques in rendering and computer graphics'. Monolith soft have been creating new rendering techniques for the switch in both XC3 and TOTK I believe, that statement isn't limited to the context of new hardware. Could this all be for Switch 2? Yes. Does anything point to it strongly? Not really imo.

e: i guess timing points to it nvm
 
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daybreak said:
So don't follow his Twitter. It's irrelevant to his published articles.
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I don't follow his Twitter but it's just kind of weird to let him be a liar "because twitter" once again to quote the man "For those disappointed with the Skyward Sword remaster, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess are 100% coming this year. So that's at least one good 3D Zelda." 100%
 
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