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

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carbvan said:
keep your expectations in check, no one knows anything about a reveal here. for all we know this system could very well be 2025 and we don't even hear about it next year.
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How about you don't police his hype
We just proved that the same Devkits shipment pattern happened in 2016 lol.

This is the end game
 
justanotherperson said:
If it was a month away, we would've heard about it by either via leaks or by Nintendo themselves, because if an announcement is imminent they wouldn't just shadowdrop it onto the internet on a random thursday.
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We didn't hear anything more than Eurogamer at this time before the week of the reveal in 2016.
 
While it's nice to notice patterns like this, this doesn't guarantee anything in regards to the timelines being similar to the Switch reveal and launch.

It's still pretty exciting news nonetheless. The window to a reveal date gets larger by the day.
 
justanotherperson said:
If it was a month away, we would've heard about it by either via leaks or by Nintendo themselves, because if an announcement is imminent they wouldn't just shadowdrop it onto the internet on a random thursday.
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I mean I find it suspicious how quiet it actually is, honestly I feel like it’s more likely with there being basically no chatter.
 
We hit 1800 pages on Sunday and we might get halfway to 1900 before this Sunday. We're definitely hitting 2000 before the end of the month.
 
1280x720.jpg


Will Karen be back for the Switch 2 reveal?
 
carbvan said:
keep your expectations in check, no one knows anything about a reveal here. for all we know this system could very well be 2025 and we don't even hear about it next year.
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2025 is out of the question at this point considering all the reports. For one, the Switch 1 doesn’t have enough gas in the tank to last until then.
 
P4bl0 said:
What you guys are going to wear for the reveal ? I plan on having a bespoke Tuxedo with H1 embroidered in gold on the chest
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I'll probably be at work, by the time it happens (just like with the Switch), so my uniform, I guess.
 
P4bl0 said:
What you guys are going to wear for the reveal ? I plan on having a bespoke Tuxedo with H1 embroidered in gold on the chest
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Assuming it’s gonna be a weekday, during the day, my work clothes 😆

What time did the OG Switxh trailer drop in 2016?
 
carbvan said:
i agree, but we cant just go around telling people the reveal is next month. we have patterns but we also have a big holiday season coming up.
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December is exactly why it makes sense for the reveal to happen sufficiently before - Nintendo knows there's a hundred different costs of living crises affecting the majority of people in their key markets, Nintendo knows there's inflation and price hikes and that their next generation is going to be costlier to produce and priced higher to profit comfortably, indications generally seem to be leaning more towards H1 2024 than H2 2024

So the question then becomes do they stay quiet to allow people to blow their savings on a stagnating end-of-life console which could potentially affect the NG's first-year performance, or do they accept they've already done well with the OG and make sure people know at least a month in advance to save their money because it's crucial that the NG is an immediate success?
 
0
P4bl0 said:
Also if you Google the T239 Shipment description, first link is Fami and the second is.. Nvidia company shipments profile from the Import data site
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Is this our smoking gun? 👀

By the way, excuse the ignorance, but:
• T239 = Nintendo’s next gen console devkit, right? Like, will it look almost like the final console?
 
ziggyrivers said:
Is this our smoking gun? 👀

By the way, excuse the ignorance, but:
• T239 = Nintendo’s next gen console devkit, right? Like, will it look almost like the final console?
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T239 is (one of) the code name(s) for the chip which beyond a reasonable doubt will be the main SoC powering the next Nintendo console and the devkits thereof.

It's not a code name for the console or the devkits themselves, just the chip.
 
D36 said:
Is there any need for a Deck 2?
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You would be surprised, a lot of modern games have trouble running on the Deck like Plague Tale Requiem, Starfield, Forspoken etc. This occurs due to either the CPU not being powerful enough, or the GPU running out of VRAM (which I think they should make a 32gb model to circumvent this).

Again, Valve said a "Steam Deck 2". Doesn't mean a 1.5 could come out and increase performance and battery life. Just not to the extent a 2 would.
 
Concernt said:
I did mean "RT Cores", proper noun, Nvidia's solution, not that other handhelds won't or can't have RT acceleration.
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Is "Nvidia's solution" referring to the dedicated ray tracing hardware? Or is "Nvidia's solution" referring to ray tracing performance?

In terms of ray tracing performance, Intel Arc GPUs are actually very competitive against Ampere GPUs, and does beats Ampere GPUs for a couple of games.

And I don't know as far the dedicated ray tracing hardware since Meteor Lake hasn't been released yet.
news.samsung.com

Samsung Showcases Groundbreaking Logic Innovations at System LSI Tech Day 2023

Samsung emphasizes its vision to propel the Fourth Industrial Revolution forward through a comprehensive System LSI humanoid platform; Inaugural event offers an early glimpse of next-gen logic portfolio encompassing Exynos 2400 mobile processor, Zoom Anyplace camera sensor technology, vision...
news.samsung.com news.samsung.com
⋮
First Glimpse of Exynos 2400 Mobile Processor and Zoom Anyplace Image Sensor Technology

One of the event's highlights was the preview of Samsung's next-generation flagship mobile processor, the Exynos 2400 with Xclipse 940 GPU based on the latest AMD RDNA™ 3 architecture. A live demo showcased the processor's substantially enhanced ray tracing capability, promising improved realism and immersion in gaming through a range of optical effects including global illumination, reflection and shadow rendering.

Achieving significant advancements in computing performance, the Exynos 2400 processor features a 1.7x increase in CPU performance and a remarkable 14.7x boost in AI performance compared to the previous Exynos 2200 product. Additionally, Samsung introduced a new AI tool designed for upcoming smartphones, demonstrating text-to-image AI generation using its Exynos 2400 reference board.
⋮
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feels like ignoring someone hardly matters when half the thread comprises people quoting that person’s sensationalist takes
 
LiC said:
Here's a summary of what I posted about the shipment listings across a few pages.

0: The original post, linking to a tweet from an unreliable Korean rumormonger that was screenshotting a publicly available website with a shipping/customs record related to T239, but providing no context for its apparent claim about T239 using 8nm.

1: Breaking down what the various terms mean in the T239 "test board" description I found while searching, and how it has nothing to do with the foundry/process node.

2: Responding to the screenshot of the "T239 SW development platform CARPA X1" description that was in the original tweet, which also has nothing to do with the foundry/process node, but is potentially interesting. I mentioned that someone else had already found this particular listing in September 2022, probably spurred by everybody discussing the Linux commits and the CPU cores.

3: Comparing to another listing for an RTX 4080 test board sent to the same company, confirming a 128-bit memory bus for T239 and also showing that test boards were being sent for some products even after they were publicly released. Clarifying why the original tweet probably wasn't supposed to be about about the process node anyway.

4: Identifying that all the shipments were between different branches of Nvidia, with all of them either coming from or going to their office in India. Showing that the dates for the "test boards" went from April 2022 to November 2022, and the dates for the "software development platform" went from July 2022 to May 2023, which matches up with the timeline we already inferred for physical production of T239 in 2022.

5: Clarifying how the part number for the "test board" is related to ones used for T234/Orin during its development.

6: Attempting to recap things because the discussion was already fragmented.

7: Explaining what a DDK (device driver kit) is as my guess for the "software development platform" shipments. Clarifying that Carpa is not the known codename of Nintendo's hardware or its motherboard.

8: Identifying devkit-related listings from during the Switch 1's development, and comparing to the T239 "software development platform" listing, suggesting that the latter could be shipments of devkits for Nintendo's new hardware.

9: I should probably make a hub post.

10: Yup.

11: You are here.
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Thank you for this!
 
boomersooner2000 said:
How does the FDE on the rumored T239 work? I just want to get a better understanding on its capabilities
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The component is brand new, we don't really know much about it. Presumably it will take a block of data from some source (I assume RAM, Switch storage is heavily abstracted and encrypted, and the RAM is unified) and decompressing it according to some known algorithm. I don't think we have any solid information on which algorithm will be used, it'll just be something they can implement faster in hardware than in software.
 
Pokemaniac said:
The component is brand new, we don't really know much about it. Presumably it will take a block of data from some source (I assume RAM, Switch storage is heavily abstracted and encrypted, and the RAM is unified) and decompressing it according to some known algorithm. I don't think we have any solid information on which algorithm will be used, it'll just be something they can implement faster in hardware than in software.
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when data is coming from storage, it first goes to the FDE to be decompressed then passed to ram
 
ziggyrivers said:
Wonder how many pages we’ll hit after the reveal trailer 🫠
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Probably not much more since by that point the "Nintendo Switch 2 Announced, 2024 Release, presentation confirmed" Will be the main thread.

As for this discussion, you know Nintendo Prime is making a video as we speak about this lol.
 
kvetcha said:
Changing the node requires redesigning the chip, which entails a different code name. We’d likely have seen evidence before now.
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Why do you believe we would have seen evidence by now? There is SO much we don’t know about Switch 2, we just have informed guesses.

I think you’re putting too much weight on the idea what known evidence is a snapshot of the entire range of outcomes.
Skittzo said:
I'm pretty sure that's not possible. The chip is the chip, making the same chip on another node is just making a new chip.
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Erista and Mariko are two different nodes of the same chip.

Just because we don’t know the name doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

carbvan said:
Not impossible, but wouldn't that create hurdles for the developers? Not that dev kits are 1-1 recreationss of consoles in the first place, but I thought 8nm was such a big deal breaker that they'd want to avoid it in their dev kits too.
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The 8N dev kit can be set to target device specs. It doesn’t need to be on the same node. Dev kit doesn’t need to be limited by energy consumption/heat/battery life.

No one is walking around with a battery powered dev kit. It’s for sure just a mode on a stationary device.
 
Pokemaniac said:
The component is brand new, we don't really know much about it. Presumably it will take a block of data from some source (I assume RAM, Switch storage is heavily abstracted and encrypted, and the RAM is unified) and decompressing it according to some known algorithm. I don't think we have any solid information on which algorithm will be used, it'll just be something they can implement faster in hardware than in software.
Click to expand...
I assume the purpose of the FDE should be to take data from storage (cartridge, internal, or expansion card) via DMA, decompress it, and put the decompressed data into RAM. It shouldn't need to go into RAM first before decompression, and shouldn't need to use the CPU except to initiate the operation.
 
Vash_the_Stampede said:
Erista and Mariko are two different nodes of the same chip.
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Meaning they are different chips. It’s
not just a matter of taking the same chip and doing it smaller. It has to be effectively redesigned to utilize the new node. Meaning you’d be doing all the work twice to have a dev kit built on SEC8 and a release console built on TSMC N4. It doesn’t make sense.
 
LiC said:
I assume the purpose of the FDE should be to take data from storage (cartridge, internal, or expansion card) via DMA, decompress it, and put the decompressed data into RAM. It shouldn't need to go into RAM first before decompression, and shouldn't need to use the CPU except to initiate the operation.
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The problem is that the data is stored encrypted. Perhaps some decryption support will be built in, but otherwise the data would have to go through the CPU first. There could probably still be some more direct path for it, in that case.
 
Vash_the_Stampede said:
I know. I just don’t understand why you think it’s unbelievable.
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I wouldn't say it's unbelievable, just pretty unlikely.

We also have a mega hack from last year showing all of the tegra chips in development and it was just T239. If there was another chip being made (a die shrink of T239) it would have a different code name and would also be in the files for NVN2.
 
justanotherperson said:
If it was a month away, we would've heard about it by either via leaks or by Nintendo themselves, because if an announcement is imminent they wouldn't just shadowdrop it onto the internet on a random thursday.
Click to expand...
Such a thing wouldn't leak until a day before, at least not an entire month before. We didn't know the OLED Reveal was in July until, like, a day or two before it was, same with the OG Switch.

Also, we have a lot of clues pointing to something next month anyway, like the leaked Amiibo restocks.
 
Paraspikey said:
Such a thing wouldn't leak until a day before, at least not an entire month before. We didn't know the OLED Reveal was in July until, like, a day or two before it was, same with the OG Switch.

Also, we have a lot of clues pointing to something next month anyway, like the leaked Amiibo restocks.
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Who leaked the OLED Reveal ? 🤔
 
Pokemaniac said:
The problem is that the data is stored encrypted. Perhaps some decryption support will be built in, but otherwise the data would have to go through the CPU first. There could probably still be some more direct path for it, in that case.
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It's likely that the FDE will do both, otherwise its usefulness would be greatly reduced. And I recall it showed up alongside some crypto-related defines in the Linux commits.
 
P4bl0 said:
Who leaked the OLED Reveal ? 🤔
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I think a bunch of journalists said a "Switch Pro" reveal was imminent in early July 2021. It doesn't really make sense for this sort of thing to leak a month in advance since Nintendo would want something like this to be very down low.
 
Paraspikey said:
Such a thing wouldn't leak until a day before, at least not an entire month before. We didn't know the OLED Reveal was in July until, like, a day or two before it was, same with the OG Switch.

Also, we have a lot of clues pointing to something next month anyway, like the leaked Amiibo restocks.
Click to expand...

Insiders didn't leak about the Switch (then NX) reveal until like 12 hours before the trailer (and only like an hour or two before Nintendo announced it).
 
Vash_the_Stampede said:
I know. I just don’t understand why you think it’s unbelievable.
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given how we have recent test cases and now these shipments, any new chip would mean Switch 2 is more 2025/2026 because they haven't shown up. the Nvidia leaks even has stuff for the upcoming Blackwell. if this new chip isn't in those leaks, then it's even further than Blackwell, a 2025 gpu
 
TLZ said:
I found your comparison was simply incorrect. I took a picture because what you said made no sense you made me doubt myself for a second that I had to pull both of them out and check. Tabletop is irrelevant since you're comparing the full console.

Just because the Switch is smaller than some of the current PC portables, it doesn't make it small and light. And let's be honest here, who actually buys these? Hardly any. I don't think many even know of their existence apart from us enthusiasts. They're never in any stores. So I can only imagine people either comparing their Switch to their prior portables, 3DS, DS, PSP, Vita, or to their phones. And in both cases, the Switch is big.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that. You said your piece and I said mine. There was no attitude. No need to be touchy about it. Just stating what I see Infront of me.

peace-out.gif
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Are people really this rude here?
 
Quoted by: TLZ
1
kvetcha said:
Because it’s very expensive and it’s something you aim to do once. They wouldn’t design and produce a chip at an inferior node just to use in a couple thousand dev kits.
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No, the initial plan was Samsung 8N along with Orin but they they changed course and decided to redesign for a superior node.

Orin was gonna be 8N either way. But now, Nintendo can amortize $100m- $200m of redesign costs over 100m+ units so the per unit cost is only $1-$2m. And you’re not starting from scratch if you can share processes from other chips. Especially since utilization rates dropped for sold advanced nodes after the shortage ended.
 
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