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

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ziggyrivers said:
With what we “know” about the possible specs, what price point are we expecting? $349-399?
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I’m expecting £350 / €399 / $399 roughly a 40-50 increase over the OLED.

But I think that’ll be the target regardless of specs? Even if the console was significantly better/worse than the threads’ expectations, that’s the price point Nintendo would be aiming for.

Hope that makes sense!
 
Dakhil said:
Speaking of, I think this is a nice reminder to everyone.
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Considering that the architectural change I assume they're referring to here (making the INT ALUs able to also support FP16 ops) also applies to Ampere, it'll be interesting comparing RDNA 3 to ampere. Which I have numbers for here somewhere...
 
oldpuck said:
Considering that the architectural change I assume they're referring to here (making the INT ALUs able to also support FP16 ops) also applies to Ampere, it'll be interesting comparing RDNA 3 to ampere. Which I have numbers for here somewhere...
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Btw, this doesn’t affect the FP16, only affects the FP32 performance.

So it acts as a pseudo 1:1 FP32 to FP16 like Ampere is 1:1 FP32:FP16 (shader, not TC)
 
TLZ said:
I don't see Nintendo going anywhere above $399.
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Well, if they can sell outdated hardware for $349 and knowing they never sell it at a loss, I don't think it's weird that they'll sell new, more expensive hardware for more. Plus you have to take inflation into account...

Its true that going over 399$ is risky and people may raise an eyebrow thats for sure.
 
karmitt said:
It does feel too high for Nintendo. It continues to feel right that they decommission Redbox, drop OLED to $299, and launch the new system at $399.
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I was gonna say two things, but I cancelled them out myself:
• Can’t drop OLED price because there’s Zelda OLEDs still, but by the time the successor comes, that stock would be depleted

• Sell Drake at $349, but Redacted having a price point similar to the OLED could communicate it’s a revision, so a $100 premium does a a fine job at saying: this is the newest product that is obviously a massive upgrade
 
Oh, that Z1 Extreme is definitely bandwidth starved, relative to the discrete cards (not that it's a surprise). If we assume LPDDR5X-7500 MT/s (which is the highest officially supported by the Phoenix chips), Bandwidth:Compute ratio slides in under the two RX 7900 cards, and of course there's no big chunk of L3 cache here. And it's even worse if it's actually regular LPDDR5 instead of 5X. In that scenario, the transfer rate is... not stated by AMD, actually. Great, I'd like to assume 6400 MT/s from AMD by now, but it could very well still be 5500 or something :unsure:

Random: Interesting, there's definitely some (software side?) tweaking to separate laptop Zen 4 from desktop. See that 1.7 ghz for the CPU in harukaze's tweet that Dakhil linked? Desktop Zen 4 idles at 3 ghz.

...also, wow, close to 26 watts (for just the SOC itself?) just for 1.7 ghz for the CPU and... 2.1 ghz, or about 3/4 of the GPU's max clock?
 
ziggyrivers said:
With what we “know” about the possible specs, what price point are we expecting? $349-399?
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Unlikely it's as cheap as $350 when they still won't drop the price of the OLED and Switch. Maybe $350 for Lite variation but the regular model will likely be either $400 or $450. All depends on how close nintendo is willing to go on profit margins for hardware. Mario movie sold extremely well which means they now have extra revenue to lean into if they want to cut it close on hardware profits.
 
ziggyrivers said:
I was gonna say two things, but I cancelled them out myself:
• Can’t drop OLED price because there’s Zelda OLEDs still, but by the time the successor comes, that stock would be depleted

• Sell Drake at $349, but Redacted having a price point similar to the OLED could communicate it’s a revision, so a $100 premium does a a fine job at saying: this is the newest product that is obviously a massive upgrade
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The Zelda OLED is a limited edition. It would not be available during the launch of the next console.
 
$399 makes the most sense to me and I think for Nintendo they want the smoothest transition possible because they’ll probably be afraid of having a new gen system be $400. They want to make the transition from Switch to this system easy and smooth.
 
Thraktor said:
It's worth noting that these are just new brand names for the Phoenix silicon used in the Ryzen 7040 series of laptop APUs. At least the Z1 Extreme is, I'm not 100% sure about the Z1, but I'm guessing it's just a binned variant of it.

Also, the 8.6 Tflops is based on RDNA3's ability to dual-issue instructions under limited circumstances, which allows AMD to claim double the theoretical peak Tflops. Without dual-issue it would be 4.3 Tflops. All Tflops figures are theoretical, but the effectiveness of this dual-issue functionality is limited at best, and honestly it's quite misleading in terms of performance. If you compare the specs of the RX 7900XT (RDNA3) to the RX 6900XT (RDNA2), the RX 7900 XT has about 15% more theoretical performance if you ignore dual-issue, and about 130% more theoretical performance if you include dual-issue in the Tflops calculation. Actual performance of the RX 7900XT is only about 20% better than the RX 6900XT.

Effectively, if you want to compare this to RDNA2 GPUs like those used in Steam Deck, the 4.3 Tflops number is more realistic. Not that it's going to hit that without tanking the battery life, in any case. It would require peak clocks of 2.8GHz, and even at 30W TDP I'd be surprised if it'll be able to maintain anywhere near that clock. It's also likely to be heavily bandwidth-constrained, in any case.
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Is the dual issue instructions similar to single and double precision?
ReddDreadtheLead said:
It’s, like, 21GB/s
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I know how much it was. Just wondering if that was really the bottleneck in handheld, at least when compared to docked mode. I feel like the overall bandwidth was the bottleneck, and more so on the docked side when scaling the resolution-- with only a ~20% difference between handheld and docked. Like if we have lpddr4x with 21 GB/s in handheld and 33 GB/s on docked, that could have given us more 1080p docked games instead of 900, me thinks.

Edit: Saw old puck's post.


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The base phoenix is 6 core CPU and 12 threads and I think the upgraded one is 8 core CPU with 16 threads. Assuming CPU speeds are at 3-3.5, GHz that's fairly impressive I guess, if it's all 30 watts for the SoC, meaning 3-3. 5GhzCPU and 2-2.8 GHz GPU (4 tflops or high 3), etc. It's a handheld Series S, but bottle necked the **** out in bandwidth XD ! Should be able to run any current gen game in 720p at least, and 1080p in certain situations (low settings).

The benchmarks for games are not too shabby. But we'll see real performance runs..

Will be interesting to see how switch 2 compares. Should sort of match on GPI and RAM, minus CPU power.
 
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ziggyrivers said:
With what we “know” about the possible specs, what price point are we expecting? $349-399?
Click to expand...
pelusilla6 said:
399$ to 449$ is my bet, tax included
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TLZ said:
I don't see Nintendo going anywhere above $399.
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pelusilla6 said:
Plus you have to take inflation into account...
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It’ll be $399. Look at these inflation adjusted prices of old Nintendo consoles.

N64: $379.44
GameCube: $336.35
Wii: $370.98
Wii U: $389.61
Switch: $372.71
Switch OLED: $386.42

Basically, except the GameCube, these prices are all within 20 dollars of each other. Let’s look at the inflation adjusted cost of SOC NVidia’s devkit.

Jetson TX1 4GB RAM: $757.34
Jetson Orin NX 16GB: $699.00

So, Nvidia is able to deliver roughly the same power as T239, and a large RAM upgrade for the same cost, adjusted for inflation.

All of which makes pretty clear that Nintendo can deliver a T239 Switch at the 400 dollar price point, which would be a small increase over their historical prices, adjusted for inflation.

Maybe Nintendo decides to take a hit, or reusing production lines streamline costs, and Nintendo manages to get it to $350. But north of $399 USD is madness.
 
ShadowFox08 said:
Is the dual issue instructions similar to single and double precision?

I know how much it was. Just wondering if that was really the bottleneck in handheld, at least when compared to docked mode. I feel like the overall bandwidth was the bottleneck, and more so on the docked side when scaling the resolution-- with only a ~20% difference between handheld and docked. Like if we have lpddr4x with 21 GB/s in handheld and 33 GB/s on docked, that could have given us more 1080p docked games instead of 900, me thinks.

Edit: Saw old puck's post.


* Hidden text: cannot be quoted. *


The base phoenix is 6 core CPU and 12 threads and I think the upgraded one is 8 core CPU with 16 threads. Assuming CPU speeds are at 3-3.5, GHz that's fairly impressive I guess, if it's all 30 watts for the SoC, meaning 3-3. 5GhzCPU and 2-2.8 GHz GPU (4 tflops or high 3), etc. It's a handheld Series S, but bottle necked the **** out in bandwidth XD ! Should be able to run any current gen game in 720p at least, and 1080p in certain situations (low settings).

The benchmarks for games are not too shabby. But we'll see real performance runs..

Will be interesting to see how switch 2 compares. Should sort of match on GPI and RAM, minus CPU power.
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Wait that’s my post 😂
 
oldpuck said:
I mean, it was both. Switch is very bandwidth constrained, any reduction in the memory clock just makes it worse. Thought Nintendo may have made some perf profiles where it kept the MC at full clock in handheld? I should double check

Push GPU further, you reduce time spent rendering, you can afford more latency. There is a limit of course, because if you can't keep the GPU fed, latency/idle periods increase.
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It was odd because Nintendo is usually very good with memory
 
HockeyBird said:
So what's the predicted release of this thing? People still learning towards early next year or is this year a possibility?
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Well according to the recent poll, most people are optimistic and leaning toward the end of this year, H2 2023. Still, lots of people also believe in H1 2024. Then some for H2 2024, with barely anyone believing 2025 and onward.
 
The only news of note today is that TSMC 4nm is readily available in a mobile form factor releasing this year. This can only be seen as a net positive for Nintendo; as it will certainly trickle down to lower costs of [TBA].
 
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
"The Switch 2 will release at the end of 2023 on TSMC 5nm+ at only $50 more than the Switch OLED" comes off as pretty contradictory, lol.
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So what? Ice is dry, it still exists. As it stands, 399$, late 2023, TSMC, these just seem like the most likely scenario. Could these be inaccurate? Sure! Of course! But as it stands right now, those seem to be the most likely.
 
All this talk about fab process, isn’t Nvidia producing a lot less RTX 4000 cards than 3000 which means that the amount of production lines are open? Likely the same same with the 3000 series that isn’t being produced that much anymore
 
oldpuck said:
Maybe Nintendo decides to take a hit, or reusing production lines streamline costs, and Nintendo manages to get it to $350. But north of $399 USD is madness.
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Probably. Something tells me the form factor won’t change that much. Just the presentation

Eclissi said:
Are we talking about price again? The loop!
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My bad 😅 I took my time to read the technical aspects and just wanted to see a better input xD
 
ILikeFeet said:
when they have control over the design. TX1 was an off the shelf part so unless they spent more money on a custom job, this was the best they were gonna get on short notice. Drake will be a return to norm however
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I still wonder about the illegal Nvidia leaks showing Drake's GPU having 1 MB of L2 cache.
 
oldpuck said:
It’ll be $399. Look at these inflation adjusted prices of old Nintendo consoles.

N64: $379.44
GameCube: $336.35
Wii: $370.98
Wii U: $389.61
Switch: $372.71
Switch OLED: $386.42

Basically, except the GameCube, these prices are all within 20 dollars of each other. Let’s look at the inflation adjusted cost of SOC NVidia’s devkit.

Jetson TX1 4GB RAM: $757.34
Jetson Orin NX 16GB: $699.00

So, Nvidia is able to deliver roughly the same power as T239, and a large RAM upgrade for the same cost, adjusted for inflation.

All of which makes pretty clear that Nintendo can deliver a T239 Switch at the 400 dollar price point, which would be a small increase over their historical prices, adjusted for inflation.

Maybe Nintendo decides to take a hit, or reusing production lines streamline costs, and Nintendo manages to get it to $350. But north of $399 USD is madness.
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I think that's a decent analysis, BUT, I think that also depends on what they pack in. I think the device could survive in the market launching for 450 USD, but Nintendo would only really hit that if they decided to throw in some sort of extra gimmick that drives up the BOM, like a HFR, HDR screen, and/or full inside out tracking in the new Joy-Con.

Regardless of whether they go with something like that, I do think the new device will eventually fill the VR niche at the medium to low end. 1080p VR was considered part of the premium VR segment not too long ago, and this device has the specs to make VR actually very compelling. With the screen, processing unit, battery and controllers all in one box and a 50 dollar headstrap a year or two into its life, I could see it taking a significant portion of the active userbase for VR, and convincing a lot of people on the fence about it who already have the device to jump in.
 
Concernt said:
Regardless of whether they go with something like that, I do think the new device will eventually fill the VR niche at the medium to low end.
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I really hope Nintendo stays away from VR. People might feel differently but high end hardware really is a must to have a good experience imho. We will se what happens with Apples rumored device but to date there are lots of big corporations that have poured billions into r&d and subsidized hardware in order to prop up a market without getting there. Sonys new headset is great hardware, and while arguably great value compared to the rest of the market and considering the technology, it’s still very expensive. And still no one has come up with killer app software experiences for VR.

At the end of the day, strapping a device to your face is something that doesn’t have mass market appeal. And the technology necessary in order to make it at least somewhat appealing beyond a superfluous device for rich people that use it 10 times and then have laying around is at least a decade away from being affordable enough.

Having said all that, the one enticing thing with Nintendo and VR is that they basically never have made a first person game and I’m curious as to how a nintendo would tackle that. And nintendo could probably develop good software for VR since that have a lot of experience developing for handhelds and creating gameplay that fits short sessions.
 
Christer said:
I really hope Nintendo stays away from VR. People might feel differently but high end hardware really is a must to have a good experience imho. We will se what happens with Apples rumored device but to date there are lots of big corporations that have poured billions into r&d and subsidized hardware in order to prop up a market without getting there. Sonys new headset is great hardware, and while arguably great value compared to the rest of the market and considering the technology, it’s still very expensive. And still no one has come up with killer app software experiences for VR.

At the end of the day, strapping a device to your face is something that doesn’t have mass market appeal. And the technology necessary in order to make it at least somewhat appealing beyond a superfluous device for rich people that use it 10 times and then have laying around is at least a decade away from being affordable enough.

Having said all that, the one enticing thing with Nintendo and VR is that they basically never have made a first person game and I’m curious as to how a nintendo would tackle that. And nintendo could probably develop good software for VR since that have a lot of experience developing for handhelds and creating gameplay that fits short sessions.
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The most successful VR ventures by userbase are Meta Quest/2 and Google Cardboard (which is still supported by every Android phone since introduction.)

The common attribute isn't high quality, it's accessibility, and "adequate quality".

Phone VR is adequate quality for a giant movie screen type experience or a walking tour of a city, or a safari video. Meta Quest 2 is good enough for simple games and social experiences.
 
ShaunSwitch said:
SMD64 has entered the chat.

*Not implying CypressFX is akin to SMD64, just making a joke about the old Switch will be an AMD powerhouse home console days.
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Honestly, T239 on 4N from TSMC or 5LPE would achieve better performance per watt, so I'm not exactly worried about these as a point of comparison.
 
ReddDreadtheLead said:
Wait that’s my post 😂
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Oh I know that's your post I quoted.
roccerfeller said:
It was odd because Nintendo is usually very good with memory
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I mean supposedly the Switch was gonna come with 3 GB RAM, until Capcom convinced Njtnendo to make it 4GB. Unfortunately the 25 GB/s from lppdr4 was the best that was available. The TX2 has twice the amount of bandwidth because the bus bandwidth was 128 bit total. That would have mean even more power needed, and tx1 wasn't built for that anyway.

HockeyBird said:
So what's the predicted release of this thing? People still learning towards early next year or is this year a possibility?
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A lot of people here are thinking Q4 2023- Q1 2024.

Q4 2023 is because
Nintendo hasn't really announced any big 1st party games after July/for the holidays yet. That would be a good time to release a Mario game and Switch 2, though that doesn't mean it would be Switch 2 exclusive. If we get an announcement this year for a Q4 release, it would be in the summer. June sounds like a good bet.

Also there's reason to believe the chip has been done since last year.

For a Q1 2024 release, we'd probably get announcement this Fall (like the Switch).

But really it's anyone's good of a guess. Q4 2024 seems too late. IIRC, So far no console has released beyond 7 years. It's definitely a first for a Nintendo home console
 
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