Welcome back! It really has been... 500+ pages since you hung out here. Woof! It'll be hard for me to remember what's transpired, exactly, though you're probably right to bow out because despite the sound and fury, not much has changed?
The chip is still Drake
Every time reliable hardware detail comes out, it just confirms prior knowledge/speculation about Drake/T239. Most recently,
@LiC r
an down a rabbit hole of shipping/customs documents, and found records of what are almost certainly devkits being shipped to/from an Nvidia division in India. Dates match the speculated tape-out timeline, explicitly mention T239, and confirm it's memory bus.
The storage is very fast
Multiple reports have come out about fast on-board storage and a new cartridge format. Here is
Nate's podcast about loading times in the Gamescom demos.
@Thraktor hunted down a
candidate for the new cart technology
LCD screen
VGC reported that the device might have a LCD screen instead of an OLED...
* Hidden text: cannot be quoted. *
RAM
Nate has said he's gotten conflicting info on RAM but that "8GB is not one of the numbers I've heard." necrolipe, brazilian journalist and now thread semi-regular, has said he's heard 12GB for retail, with 16GB in devkits, matching prior speculation
The Gamescom Demos
VGC,
Eurogamer, and Nate (previously linked) all reported on demos from Gamescom. At least one demo ran on "target spec hardware", not a devkit, and the demos were not hands on.
One demo was the Matrix Awakens, running with some kind of ray tracing. Reports have said things like "comparable to Series S" but without further details, it's unclear what that means. Here is a
Digital Foundry video that I think dives into that pretty well but it matches "plausible but optimistic" descriptions of what T239 could be capable of that you likely remember
The other demo was a high frame-rate, high-res
Breath of the Wild. According to Nate, the primary intent of that demo was to show that loading times have been "erased". Strong support for prior speculation on UFS based storage, and the powers of the File Decompression Engine.
Clock speeds
Not long after you left the thread,
@Thraktor did some
really smart analysis of power curves. The ultra-short version is that very low clocks on T239 don't make
financial sense. This is also considered solid evidence of the process node.
That debate is as ongoing as ever, but the era of arguing that "Nintendo will clock this thing into the ground" is mostly over.
Battery Life
A loooooong while back I was reliably told that Nintendo was shooting for 3-6 hours of battery life. I have no idea if there is another source for that info, but I considered it stale enough for everyone involved to have plausible deniability, so I brought it up. Season that with salt to taste.
Gimmick? Camera?
Nothing about a new control scheme or feature has come out except for some likely-bullshit reports about a camera.
Launch Timing
@fwd-bwd has uncovered "for entertainment purposes only" some Taiwanese investment rags claiming that Foxconn expects manufacturing to happen later this year. They've doubled down on that report as recently as
last week.
Nate also heard a context-less "March" rumor. Emphasis on context-less. Could be reveal, could be an internal deadline, could be just rumblings in as much as we have any info on it whatsoever.
I think that's the highlights?
Do we have an idea on what could be the floor for cartridge sizes? I can't imagine many games going forward except for the most niche indie titles that get a limited physical release would require something as low as 1GB or 2GB (and hell I'd be shocked if it even did that go low). That said, the lowest game cartridge size being, say, 8GB, and also being drastically cheaper compared to the current Switch cards of 8GB storage...idk where I'm going with this thought but I mean I feel like the ones who care most about their games going on the smallest viable cartridge would probably look at the Switch more favourably as a console to develop for, hopefully.
