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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (New Staff Post, Please read)

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Intoxicate said:
Does anyone know why the Switch Game Cards have so many pins. I count 16 which is a lot compared to SD / micro SD. Or are they grouped/redundant for longevity?
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This might help: (source is a Nintendo patent from 2017)

switch_cartridge_pinofwj1x.jpg
 
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Intoxicate said:
Does anyone know why the Switch Game Cards have so many pins. I count 16 which is a lot compared to SD / micro SD. Or are they grouped/redundant for longevity?
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SD cards actually start getting more pins as soon as you get a speed class substantially above what the Switch uses. Depending on the protocol, it can help move data faster by doing it in more lanes at once.
 
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Imagination continuing to push a categorization of RT capabilities when they can't even make a proper kit of hardware (the last one they did was in 2016), properly classify current gpus, and (by nature of publication) will miss upcoming examples doesn't make their classification all that useful.

the tech demo they had recently wasn't even running on Imagination hardware, meanwhile ARM and Mediatek are showing off RT on unaccelerated gpus. put up or shut up Imagination
 
Dakhil said:
So Nvidia released a research paper about ray tracing on 13 January 2022 titled "GPU Subwarp Interleaving".
And speaking about ray tracing, Imagination Technologies released a white paper on 4 November 2021 titled "White Paper: Rays Your Game: Introduction to the PowerVR Photon Architecture" that not only talked about the 5 levels of ray tracing, but also talked about the IMG CXT GPU specs, which is publicly available courtesy of Balkroth at [H]ard|Forum.
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Up to 20% increase in performance is pretty crazy, even half of that will make Hopper GPU's RT capabilities significant over Ampere(if Lovelace does not include these advancements also).
 
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careers.nintendo.com

Job Openings - Careers at Nintendo of America

Intern ? Wi-Fi / Bluetooth Software Engineer (NTD), Internship
careers.nintendo.com careers.nintendo.com

Intern – Wi-Fi / Bluetooth Software Engineer (NTD)​

⋮

DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES

We are seeking an entry-level engineer who is available during the summer of 2022 to join the team responsible for prototyping and evaluating Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology using off-the-shelf hardware and software. Implement applications to test the hardware, software, and wireless protocol, perform the testing, and create design and test reports.

SUMMARY OF REQUIREMENTS
  • Rising senior pursuing BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, CS or Engineering related field
  • Background or interest in wireless communications
  • Requires strong C/C++ programming experience with some Linux exposure
  • Knowledge of wireless communications standards (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE/5G, LoRa) is a plus
  • Good written and communication skills
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Dakhil said:
See the two posts above this post.
ReddDreadtheLead's 100% joking.
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Dekuman said:
I wonder if they're trying to do something different with bluetooth /wi-fi
maybe for file and data transfers
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Have we ever seen recent job postings from Nintendo that mention this?
  • Knowledge of wireless communications standards (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE/5G, LoRa) is a plus
LoRa is interesting because I wonder if they plan on bringing something like Streetpass back with the next Switch hardware...

This description is what makes me think of this:

LoRa® and LoRaWAN​

Operating on the physical (PHY) layer, LoRa® is a proprietary RF modulation technology for LPWANs. It is derived from existing chirp spread spectrum technology and uses six orthogonal data rates, or spreading factors (SF7 – SF12) for long range data transmissions: up to three miles (five kilometers) in urban areas, and up to 10 miles (15 kilometers) or more in rural areas (with a clear line of sight), although distances are much shorter in highly industrial areas that include many metal structures. The larger the spreading factor used, the farther the signal will be able to travel and still be received without errors by the RF receiver.
 
NineTailSage said:
Have we ever seen recent job postings from Nintendo that mention this?
  • Knowledge of wireless communications standards (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE/5G, LoRa) is a plus
LoRa is interesting because I wonder if they plan on bringing something like Streetpass back with the next Switch hardware...

This description is what makes me think of this:

LoRa® and LoRaWAN​

Operating on the physical (PHY) layer, LoRa® is a proprietary RF modulation technology for LPWANs. It is derived from existing chirp spread spectrum technology and uses six orthogonal data rates, or spreading factors (SF7 – SF12) for long range data transmissions: up to three miles (five kilometers) in urban areas, and up to 10 miles (15 kilometers) or more in rural areas (with a clear line of sight), although distances are much shorter in highly industrial areas that include many metal structures. The larger the spreading factor used, the farther the signal will be able to travel and still be received without errors by the RF receiver.
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Very interesting.
 
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It'll be great if Switch Dane/DLSS model has the capability to have a 'burst' speed for wireless the same way Switch can bump up the CPU clocks to load faster, to enable the return of download play as a semi-common feature. I'm not expecting it and I don't know enough about wireless standards to know whether that's a thing that is possible, but it would be great considering Switch is already the best current system for local multiplayer games.
 
Future Boy Nemo said:
It'll be great if Switch Dane/DLSS model has the capability to have a 'burst' speed for wireless the same way Switch can bump up the CPU clocks to load faster, to enable the return of download play as a semi-common feature. I'm not expecting it and I don't know enough about wireless standards to know whether that's a thing that is possible, but it would be great considering Switch is already the best current system for local multiplayer games.
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Possible via Bluetooth? I can transfer batches of large photos from one phone to another via BT in a few seconds.

I assume most people wouldn't mind a 30 second wait, which I roughly guesstimate would be around 0.5GB of data

I think limited download play is possible, just a matter of how big the files are
 
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Dakhil said:
Nvidia has just made the GTC 2022 (Spring 2022) catalogue open.


And here are some sessions that could be of interest. (Of course, there are probably other sessions I've missed that could also be of interest.)
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The Neural Graphics Primitive stuff is really interesting, Nvidia always seem to come up with great software solutions on top of hardware that has yet to be utilized in full from the ground up for dedicated gaming.
 
new products are still launching and will launch regardless. The quesiton really is when Nintendo wants to pull the trigger. Because there will be some substitution going on as they ramp down Switch production for Switch 2, some parts will be freed up that way.

I'm feeling they'll keep quiet this year and give Switch another full christmas then announce something next year. As for launch date, probably November?
The full FY briefing will be instructive, they will probably straight deny a successor is coming (gut feeling)
 
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Skittzo said:
But GDC is in March right?
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Nintendo is the one likely in charge of announcing the System (Therefore the SoC), so unless NVIDIA has permission to announce the general-use cousin to Dane a few weeks to a month in advance I doubt that Dane would be mentioned in March in an official capacity.

Although legally I think there isn't anything wrong with Nintendo announcing something for their next Fisical Year within another year (Iirc, Sony and Msoft did the exact same thing with the Series X and PS5), so they could announce it in March, maybe targeting a September launch.
 
Alovon11 said:
Nintendo is the one likely in charge of announcing the System (Therefore the SoC), so unless NVIDIA has permission to announce the general-use cousin to Dane a few weeks to a month in advance I doubt that Dane would be mentioned in March in an official capacity.

Although legally I think there isn't anything wrong with Nintendo announcing something for their next Fisical Year within another year (Iirc, Sony and Msoft did the exact same thing with the Series X and PS5), so they could announce it in March, maybe targeting a September launch.
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Dakhil said:
Yes, but I think most developers don't have devkits equipped with close to final hardware.
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Oh I'm not talking about hearing anything official, just more rumors. GDC is when a lot of industry insiders get to talk to each other and developer contacts, so we'd probably start to hear more rumors if the hardware was indeed coming in the next ~12 months.
 
Skittzo said:
Oh I'm not talking about hearing anything official, just more rumors. GDC is when a lot of industry insiders get to talk to each other and developer contacts, so we'd probably start to hear more rumors if the hardware was indeed coming in the next ~12 months.
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I was specifically talking about Dane.

The only tidbits of information I expect to maybe hear from developers indirectly on March 2022 is whether or not Nintendo has changed the launch window (NateDrake mentioned a launch window of late 2022 to early 2023) and estimated targeted performance metrics (i.e. How does the final hardware's estimated, targeted performance metrics potentially expect to compare to the Nintendo Switch's performance metrics, and/or the performance metrics of the eighth gen and/or ninth gen consoles?). (I'd admittedly like to hear about which hardware is being used for the devkits most developers currently have, but that's probably not going to happen.)
 
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This is highlighting issue that is not clicking, the “chip” shortage, or rather the Semiconductor shortage will not go away within a few months, it will go away in several years. Now, do you expect Nintendo to release a new device close to 2027/2028? This time frame is a reasonable expectation of when the chip shortage should “subside“ and it is safe to release a new product.


Do you reasonably believe that Nintendo will sit on just the Nintendo switch, the Nintendo switch lite, and the Nintendo switch OLED for five whole years (give or take) without nothing in between?


There have been numerous comments of a how they should just stockpile their stock, how they should just wait about this chip shortage to be relieved, but, I ask you, do you really believe the company that has been pushing out a product every two years during the entire Nintendo switch life cycle will suddenly just sit on the same product for five whole years without releasing an entirely new device at all?


Do you expect other companies to also just not release a product within these next five years?

Do you really think the Chip shortage is to the point where nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, can be released?

There’s a sense of some people that kind of do not want a successor to come out already, in any facet, but fail to at least look at the overall picture. To stockpile they have to expand even more money to house products that were going to sell out regardless of when they released it.

They stockpiled once and that was for the launch of the original Nintendo switch, and that was sold out very quickly. And it was only for a quarter. If you feel like including the OLED stockpiling into that, maybe? I don’t as that’s not a new platform.


The chip shortage makes it difficult to produce a lot of products, but it does not make it difficult to make a product. That is what needs to be understood about all of this. Impossibility is not the same thing as difficult. Unless something goes so bad like fires are burning down these factories left and right all over the world, and Nintendo‘s contract with Nvidia who has a contract with Samsung disappears and all the money that was paid to them complete disappears and everything just collapses as a result. And I get that I’m being over dramatic to a degree.

The only thing we do not know is if they signed a contract officially, but considering a code name for a chip exists, it likely is that a contract has already been signed. We just know literally nothing about how far along it is.
 
Skittzo said:
Basically. It's unprecedented supply that happens to find itself battling with unprecedented demand.
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And I don't expect that to change, at least not for a very long time, as more and more people opt to continue working from home.
 
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JoshuaJSlone said:
Chip production is so bad, PS5 is shipping slightly less than the most-shipped consoles ever.
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COVID has both positive and negative effects, in that it both accelerated demand beyond normal market conditions and decreased supply.
Also, unless we know how many production lines Sony had booked for PS5 components compared to other consoles they've released, it's difficult to say if the shipment number is in line with what those production lines should be capable of producing. It's quite likely Sony anticipated high demand and had more production lines opened that are producing less than other hardware did on fewer production lines. Which, hey, good on them if that's the case, otherwise the situation would be even worse than it already is.

EDIT: And those shipment numbers came at the expense of robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak, since a lot of markets outside North America got drastically short-changed with units shipped (Japan most notably), and judging by software sales in Japan, many of what few units ended up in those regions ended up being scalped and re-sold back into North America and other markets at a markup.
 
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I don't think the MSRP being in the range of $450 - $500 is outside the realm of possibility.
 
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ILikeFeet said:
they might eat a loss before hitting that number
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With an included game?
Anyway, I'm going to go off-topic here, so feel free to ignore.

So Dr Ian Cutress released an interview with Alex Katouzian, the senior vice president and the general manager of the Mobile, Compute and Infrastructure (MCI) Business Unit at Qualcomm at Anandtech and YouTube. Here are some interesting tidbits from the interview.
⋮

IC: If you can perhaps clear something up for me: is the Nuvia team making a single core, or both a big core or a little core? Or is it that they're dealing fully with the SoC structure into which you add in the connectivity and the graphics?

AK: It's both, all the above. By that I mean that it's impossible for us to put out a chipset solution as sophisticated as this without having the entire system being taken into consideration. Think of it this way: the CPU by itself is part of the 'one technology roadmap', but so is graphics, and other things. Then we're really thinking about bringing a complete system solution to the PC and changing it in such a way that you don't go after the traditional designs. You know, we talked about this before, we're looking for bill of material savings, we're looking at design savings, we're looking at internal routing, we're looking at shell designs, and we're looking at thermals - the whole thing. So it has to be a complete solution. So they're definitely involved in the whole SoC design, and they're involved in looking at multiple different cores, where it makes sense. Whether it's big cores, little cores, or a combination of how many.

⋮

IC: Qualcomm has a very efficient graphics architecture in Adreno. It usually performs really well in the mobile SoCs, but we're currently at a time where the discrete GPU market is going bananas, and everything is selling. I would love to see a scaled Adreno GPU, and given that Intel is also coming out with its own, Qualcomm could be an amazing fourth competitor in that space. We would love to get your comments on that, but the key thing is: if you were to do that, what color would it be? AMD is red, Intel is blue, NVIDIA is green, and so is an Adreno discrete GPU going to be gold?

AK: It's hard to say because we don't even have that product! But if you think along the lines of premium, yeah, you know, it would be some shade of gold. But think of it this way: we have to enter the PC market with a very sophisticated design that we've already worked on SoC-wise till now, but we're going to get a boost when it comes to CPU capability. We can scale our GPU capability just like we discussed before, and we have the ability to scale across these devices. So we definitely will have much more performing GPU and CPU cores. Obviously also concentrating on power dissipation, and those ratios have got to be right, so if we pick a design point within the PC, we'll definitely need those requirements. Then we can break off at discrete GPU if the business makes sense for it, but we definitely have the capability to scale to that level and the design capability to produce something in that market. Plus, the hard play is about having much more of an ecosystem. So once we get into the market more heavily, and get more games developed on there for example, and other applications, then, the possibility always existed.

⋮
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I'm curious about how Nuvia's efficiency CPU cores compares to Apple's efficiency CPU cores (e.g. Icestorm on the Apple A14 Bionic, Blizzard in the Apple A15 Bionic, etc.). And although I'm obviously curious to see how the GPU on Dane compares to Qualcomm's Adreno offerings (e.g. the Adreno GPU on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, etc.), I'm also curious about how Qualcomm's dedicated Adreno GPU hypothetically compares to other dedicated GPU offerings.
 
My guess is the limit is $400. I also need to stress Nintendo will likely make up the difference in software sales and royalty/licensing fees from 3rd parties. That's usually how most console manufactures would make up the costs of the console itself. Nintendo has avoided this for awhile, but I could see them doing it with the 4K/DLSS* system.
 
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I think Nintendo themselves must be s bit nervous about what follows Switch

Hardware transitions are also risky and they arent the only or 1st platform holder to stumble but whereas Sony has a lot of stakeholders that can will a stumble into a success and Microsoft can just throw money at the problem and ride it out, Nintendo isn't as advantaged here. Their recent history is also very mixed when it comes to successor or follow up platforms
 
Dekuman said:
I think Nintendo themselves must be s bit nervous about what follows Switch

Hardware transitions are also risky and they arent the only or 1st platform holder to stumble but whereas Sony has a lot of stakeholders that can will a stumble into a success and Microsoft can just throw money at the problem and ride it out, Nintendo isn't as advantaged here. Their recent history is also very mixed when it comes to successor or follow up platforms
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they've been mixed because they tried some things that were quite different than the previous piece of hardware. a combination of similar focus and hardware that naturally bleeds into the other is the best course of action, as MS and Sony has shown
 
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