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

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Guaraná said:
I have a feeling that we won't see shit until summer 2024.
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I beleove the absolute latest we will hear anything is May (mid-Spring) during their full year earnings report.

It will likely be just "we're release new hardware later this fiscal year, but you will have to wait until the full announcement" if we haven't heard anything at all (which I doubt).
 
Semi Lazy Gamer said:
I beleove the absolute latest we will hear anything is May (mid-Spring) during their full year earnings report.

It will likely be just "we're release new hardware later this fiscal year, but you will have to wait until the full announcement" if we haven't heard anything at all (which I doubt).
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I think latest is March. That's when FY2023 ends for them, and they want some good news for their investors coming into the new fiscal year.
 
Pokemaniac said:
6 months is longer than the Switch got for pre release marketing. It was closer to 4.5.
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I've been a proponent of a short release time if they really want to squeeze it in after the holidays without waiting too long to start selling, but if it's something like an October release I think they'd have little to gain by announcing it in June rather than April. Year 8 May sales aren't going to be ones they lose sleep over disrupting.
 
Concernt said:
* Hidden text: cannot be quoted. *
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A lot of people have been saying it would be revealed in 2024 and released 2nd half of 2024. Maybe more than think otherwise. I don’t think anything will have gone wrong for that to happen and I think it will have been the intent for a good while.

Just enjoy the ride now, it won’t be long until we hear something. We’ll have Switch 2 by this time next year at the latest.
 
Pokemaniac said:
6 months is longer than the Switch got for pre release marketing. It was closer to 4.5.
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And really, wasn't it kind of less than that? They didn't have 4.5 months of continuous marketing, they announced it on October 20 and didn't say anything more about it until the January presentation. They probably could've done the announcement in December and left everything else the same and it would've done just as well.
 
The time for a March release has passed right? I don’t see Nintendo announcing Switch 2 until June earliest. That gives them ample time to short things out like launch Software and build Switch 2 manufacturing plants
 
Mr Swine said:
The time for a March release has passed right? I don’t see Nintendo announcing Switch 2 until June earliest. That gives them ample time to short things out like launch Software and build Switch 2 manufacturing plants
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I wouldn't say it's unlikely it won't be announced by June. I'd be surprised if we're waiting until then to hear Nintendo mention it for the first time.
 
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Terrell said:
And the moment you encase them in a plastic shell to make them look more consumer friendly, you add more bulk to them and eliminate a chunk of available chassis space.
And then Nintendo would likely have to enable hot-swapping of NVMe drives so you didn't have to power it off to switch storage (being one of very few devices that would offer that).
It's some pretty substantial hurdles, is what I'm getting at.
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These kinds of SSDs are very easily branded such this one below.
71BVLQNOlmL.jpg


And while microSD cards are hot-swappable the Nintendo Switch does not treat it as such. It doesn't even have an eject function. If you remove it without powering it off the Switch forces a restart. If they do go with M.2 they would certainly need to add a step to make it slightly less accessible. Maybe like unscrewing the back like the 3DS to swap out its battery.
 
YolkFolk said:
A lot of people have been saying it would be revealed in 2024 and released 2nd half of 2024. Maybe more than think otherwise. I don’t think anything will have gone wrong for that to happen and I think it will have been the intent for a good while.

Just enjoy the ride now, it won’t be long until we hear something. We’ll have Switch 2 by this time next year at the latest.
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This, & Fami is quite literally the only place where I’ve seen H1 2024 be seriously entertained. I’d imagine that there be more smoke coming from industry sources if the system was launching any sooner, & Eurogamer’s nebulous “sooner if possible” just mean earlier within the second half of the year for all we know.

Even outside of the Switch 2 reports, look at Nintendo themselves. While things are very clearly slowing down for the Switch 1 software-wise, the stuff that has been rumored (as well as already revealed) indicate that the current system has enough gas left in the tank for one more general Direct alone. And in recent years, the first general Direct of the year has typically been in February.
 
Gerald said:
Im curious what is price for 512GB UFS 3.1( since NAND and RAM price drop very hard since last year)
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The kind of volume pricing Nintendo has access to is not precisely knowable. But I’ve found what looks like 256GB of eUFS 3.1 for $25 a chip when bought in volumes of 2000, and that’s non-contract bulk pricing, so expect Nintendo’s price to be lower when they’re likely committing to 10 million per year at minimum.
Thraktor said:
Honestly I think the death of UFS cards may have given them an opportunity for something better; dual-lane UFS cards. The UFS card spec only allows for one lane, compared to two for eUFS. So UFS Card 1.0 uses the same spec as eUFS 2, but only hits ~500MB/s compared to ~1GB/s, and UFS Card 3.0 uses the same spec as eUFS 3, but only hits ~1GB/s compared to ~2GB/s. The original motivation for this was almost certainly for power consumption. The UFS card spec allows for peak power of 1.62W, which dual-lane eUFS 2 would have exceeded. However, eUFS 3 and 4 are much more power efficient, and (if manufacturers are to be believed) draw around 1W for two lanes, which puts them well within the spec for UFS cards.

An important factor here is that, as far as I can tell, nobody makes single-lane eUFS devices. All UFS controllers support two lanes, and unless companies design custom controllers specifically for UFS cards (which would defeat the entire purpose of UFS cards), the hardware in UFS cards is going to be capable of much faster speeds than a single lane allows. Supporting two lanes on the card is basically free performance, at the cost of some power consumption, but still hitting much higher power efficiency than any other card format.

With no real concerns about backwards compatibility, as there are almost no original UFS cards out there, Samsung and Nintendo could redesign the standard however they want. I believe the current card doesn't use a second row of data pins to allow for simple combo sockets with microSD cards, but if Nintendo doesn't want to use a combo socket they could add the second row of pins on there anyway. They could even change the form factor or the name of the format if they really wanted, and just treat it as a new format altogether, which for consumers it basically would be.

Of course I think it's far more likely that they'll use a pre-existing standard, but I think the best possible outcome is dual-lane UFS cards. A dual-lane UFS 3.1 card would hit around 2GB/s real-world read speeds, within about 1W of power draw. From Nintendo's perspective it would allow them to get identical performance to internal storage (assuming that's also UFS 3.1) and from a customer's perspective it should cost the same amount as the existing single-lane UFS Card 3.0 spec, for around twice the performance. In theory they could push all the way up to UFS 4 for ~4GB/s or so, but frankly that's overkill for Nintendo's needs.

An alternative is they just bump the UFS card spec up to match eUFS 4.0 while sticking to a single lane. It would also hit around 2GB/s of read speeds, at lower power draw, but would be more expensive than a dual-lane UFS 3 card. It also depends on T239 having UFS 4.0 support.
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It’s really going to depend on what speed they think they need to hit with the design. If the read speeds of single-lane UFS Card 3.0 meet their needs, that means they can cheap out on the tech for internal storage and use 2-lane eUFS 2.1 and use any cost savings from that elsewhere.
 
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darthdiablo said:
* Hidden text: cannot be quoted. *
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On one hand, we have people who have worked in the game industry for decades along with literally decades of trends for when game consoles release. On the other hand, we have Vietnam shipping data that may indicate an imminent launch based on n=1 (and it wasn't an actual new console)

"Completely unprecedented" you have literally one other data point and it was a revision.
 
Mr Swine said:
The time for a March release has passed right? I don’t see Nintendo announcing Switch 2 until June earliest. That gives them ample time to short things out like launch Software and build Switch 2 manufacturing plants
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March release had been out of the cards for a long time. That said, I don't think they will wait until June to announce it. If it is an H2 release as expected then it will likely be September or November. If it is September than I would think it gets it's first mention in the financial briefing in February and announced fully in March. If it is November then June is feasible but I think we would hear about it a bit earlier.
 
Neoxon said:
This, & Fami is quite literally the only place where I’ve seen H1 2024 be seriously entertained. I’d imagine that there be more smoke coming from industry sources if the system was launching any sooner, & Eurogamer’s nebulous “sooner if possible” just mean earlier within the second half of the year for all we know.

Even outside of the Switch 2 reports, look at Nintendo themselves. While things are very clearly slowing down for the Switch 1 software-wise, the stuff that has been rumored (as well as already revealed) indicate that the current system has enough gas left in the tank for one more general Direct alone. And in recent years, the first general Direct of the year has typically been in February.
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why do you have such a problem with people predicting an h1 release? this is not your first and certainly not last post about it
 
SpaceGodzilla said:
why do you have such a problem with people predicting an h1 release? this is not your first and certainly not last post about it
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Not OP, but isn't this a speculation thread? People should be free to express their opinion; this doesn't mean they have an issue with those who don't share it. Nevertheless, it's also my experience that an H1 release hasn't been seriously entertained outside of Fami. Make of that what you will
 
Concernt said:
My crazy thought is that I hope it's CFe Type A for expandable storage AND a Micro SD slot for last gen games and captures.

The CFe reader being a slim slot behind and parralel to the Game Card Reader could be size conscious, too. It has the right speed, it wouldn't take up much more internal space, and they're actually being manufactured.

That said, my expectation currently lays with MicroSD UHS-II.
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Why are you pushing this CFe type a format? A quick search yields a Sony 160gb card for $339 on Amazon. I highly doubt Nintendo would invest in some standard that is ridiculously overpriced at GB/$ compared to SD and NVMe formats right now.

As someone else pointed out, hot swapping NVMe has its challenges. Micro SD is more than fine - there’s a reason Valve and Asus followed the same path Nintendo charted.
 
Nyrnvs said:
Why are you pushing this CFe type a format? A quick search yields a Sony 160gb card for $339 on Amazon. I highly doubt Nintendo would invest in some standard that is ridiculously overpriced at GB/$ compared to SD and NVMe formats right now.

As someone else pointed out, hot swapping NVMe has its challenges. Micro SD is more than fine - there’s a reason Valve and Asus followed the same path Nintendo charted.
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the price is artificial. the format currently caters to people with high end cameras, so they can shell out money for overpriced memory
 
wikiales said:
Not OP, but isn't this a speculation thread? People should be free to express their opinion; this doesn't mean they have an issue with those who don't share it. Nevertheless, it's also my experience that an H1 release hasn't been seriously entertained outside of Fami. Make of that what you will
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H2 haven’t been seriously entertained outside of Fami either, it has mainly been just “2024”. Unless you want to misrepresent that the entirety of “Outside Fami” is Eurogamer/VGC’s telephone game mention of H2. Make of that what you will.

Edit: The reason why the H1 vs H2 is a thing on Fami has a lot to do with there being an avatar bet thread on H1 vs H2. You don't really see much of the H1 vs H2 discourse outside Fami.
 
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ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
It’s not releasing in Q1 and there hasn’t been a Q2 launch since the N64 in 1996.
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"Something's not happening because it hasn't happened in a long time" is such a bad argument. The Switch has been a generation of unprecedented decisions and releases. Why can't Nintendo just keep doing whatever? Not to mention, there have been other game systems which have released in Q2 and many of Nintendo's handhelds released in Q1/Q2 depending on the region. In fact, the DS is the only Nintendo handheld to have a Q4 release for a handheld they've done (not counting revisions). The original Game Boy had a Q2 release in Japan and North America, the GBA had a Q1 release in Japan and Q2 release everywhere else, and the 3DS had a Q1 release world wide. For comparison, the DS launched Q4 in NA and Japan and Q1 everywhere else. Seems like the Switch fit in more with their portable console releases in terms of release date. So maybe if we're going by patterns like this, maybe Q2 is more likely.
 
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darthdiablo said:
H2 haven’t been seriously entertained outside of Fami either, it has mainly been just “2024”. Unless you want to misrepresent that the entirety of “Outside Fami” is Eurogamer/VGC’s telephone game mention of H2. Make of that what you will.
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This is a bit of a word salad. Both of the reports you dismiss as a "telephone game" explicitly mention H2 as the target, even if there are caveats involved. Surely reports from credible outlets are, at least, on par with the opinions of a handful of message board users?

If there's serious talk of H1 outside of here (i.e. actually based on evidence or authority and not just spitballing) I haven't seen it. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but I never claimed that anyways.
 
wikiales said:
Both of the reports you dismiss as a "telephone game" explicitly mention H2 as the target
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I'm not sure you realize Eurogamer and VGC is practically the same entity. They're both part of "Gamer Network". I wouldn't count the H2 mention as coming from 2 separate entities.

And just because you disagree with something doesn't make it a "word salad".
 
darthdiablo said:
I'm not sure you realize Eurogamer and VGC is practically the same entity. They're both part of "Gamer Network". I wouldn't count the H2 mention as coming from 2 separate entities.

And just because you disagree with something doesn't make it a "word salad".
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I didn't mean to offend you, I just thought the response was kind of unclear. And I don't really see how them being sister companies would influence this, but noted.
 
I feel like if they were going to release it in Q1 they would've announced it already or we would have at least rumors and leaks popping up left and right. That's not the case though. After VGC and Eurogamer reports there hasn't been any new concrete information in the media (only fake Reddit/4Chan and leaked patent stuff).

I also find it suspicious they would be presenting demos with target hardware to developers so close to launch. Games take time to port. Do we know how long before launch developers were shown demos like that for other consoles?
 
Raploz said:
I feel like if they were going to release it in Q1 they would've announced it already or we would have at least rumors and leaks popping up left and right. That's not the case though. After VGC and Eurogamer reports there hasn't been any new concrete information in the media (only fake Reddit/4Chan and leaked patent stuff).

I also find it suspicious they would be presenting demos with target hardware to developers so close to launch. Games take time to port. Do we know how long before launch developers were shown demos like that for other consoles?
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iirc, the gamescom demo is the first demo we've heard about, not the first one in general. The gamescom demo was to get more european devs on board iirc. Nintendo surely had shown the system to other, closer partners before and because those devs are closer and more trustworthy they're less likely to talk.
 
Raploz said:
I feel like if they were going to release it in Q1 they would've announced it already or we would have at least rumors and leaks popping up left and right.
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Not really. There were no leaks/rumors in the weeks leading up to the Switch 1 October 2016 announcement.

I don't think we can reasonably expect to hear leaks/rumors of a pending announcement for Switch successor either.

The announcement would probably come once mass production starts, whenever that will be. The question is how much time they want to give the mass production to ramp up the numbers of units to be sold for the launch day.
 
Raploz said:
I feel like if they were going to release it in Q1 they would've announced it already or we would have at least rumors and leaks popping up left and right. That's not the case though. After VGC and Eurogamer reports there hasn't been any new concrete information in the media (only fake Reddit/4Chan and leaked patent stuff).

I also find it suspicious they would be presenting demos with target hardware to developers so close to launch. Games take time to port. Do we know how long before launch developers were shown demos like that for other consoles?
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This is not far off from how it was for Switch. A console announcement has significantly less third party involvement than, for example, a Nintendo Direct, so they're much easier to keep under wraps.
 
carbvan said:
"Something's not happening because it hasn't happened in a long time" is such a bad argument. The Switch has been a generation of unprecedented decisions and releases. Why can't Nintendo just keep doing whatever? Not to mention, there have been other game systems which have released in Q2 and many of Nintendo's handhelds released in Q1/Q2 depending on the region. In fact, the DS is the only Nintendo handheld to have a Q4 release for a handheld they've done (not counting revisions). The original Game Boy had a Q2 release in Japan and North America, the GBA had a Q1 release in Japan and Q2 release everywhere else, and the 3DS had a Q1 release world wide. For comparison, the DS launched Q4 in NA and Japan and Q1 everywhere else. Seems like the Switch fit in more with their portable console releases in terms of release date. So maybe if we're going by patterns like this, maybe Q2 is more likely.
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“X never happens” is a much better argument than no argument or Vietnam shipping data.

Let’s go through some of the H1 systems

GBA: Planned for holiday 2000 in NA and Europe, delayed.

pocket.ign.com: It's Official: The Next Generation Game Boy

Gaming news from Pocket.IGN.com
web.archive.org

Nintendo Switch: Planned for Holiday 2016, delayed.

3DS: Planned for Holiday 2010, delayed.

www.ign.com

3DS 'Delay' Sparks Concerns - IGN

The news of a release date for Nintendo's 3DS hasn't been met with universal acclaim, with shares falling more than 9% after the announcement and as analysts predict a rocky few months for the company.
www.ign.com www.ign.com

I can’t find the original release date for the Vita so maybe it was planned to have it’s weird date always.

But non Holiday releases (since the original Game Boy) have been almost exclusively due to delays. Was the Switch 2 planned for holiday 2023 and then delayed? Mario Wonder suggests absolutely not.
 
Pokemaniac said:
This is not far off from how it was for Switch. A console announcement has significantly less third party involvement than, for example, a Nintendo Direct, so they're much easier to keep under wraps.
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This was only the case for the Switch 1 because the WiiU was a huge failure!

The Switch 2’s launch window will have massively better third party support from very leaky devs. The two situations aren’t comparable at all.
 
darthdiablo said:
Not really. There were no leaks/rumors in the weeks leading up to the Switch 1 October 2016 announcement.

I don't think we can reasonably expect to hear leaks/rumors of a pending announcement for Switch successor either.

The announcement would probably come once mass production starts, whenever that will be. The question is how much time they want to give the mass production to ramp up the numbers of units to be sold for the launch day.
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Can we say for sure how long mass production will take? 4-6 months?
 
BreakAtmo said:
Can we say for sure how long mass production will take? 4-6 months?
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I think that would depend on # of units Nintendo want available on launch day. I recall seeing someone here shared good data/numbers on the ramp up of number of units produced leading up to launch day. I'd like to go back and try to find that and review, see if I want to reframe my thinking, but I imagine Nintendo wouldn't want anything less than 4.5 months (the amount of time Switch 1 had), possibly more if they think Switch 2 is going to sell even more on launch day than Switch 1 (but with $399 price point, maybe not.. who knows)

If mass production hasn't began (and I doubt it has, I feel like if it has, Nintendo would have announced to get ahead of leaks), then the window for Q1 is rapidly closing, if not closed completely by now. April, May, and June (Q2) is still in play, IMHO.
 
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darthdiablo said:
I feel like that depends mostly on how many units Nintendo would want to have available for launch day. I recall seeing someone here shared good data/numbers on the ramp up of number of units produced leading up to launch day. I'd like to go back and try to find that and review, see if I want to reframe my thinking, but I imagine Nintendo wouldn't want anything less than 4.5 months (the amount of time Switch 1 had), possibly more if they think Switch 2 is going to sell even more on launch day than Switch 1 (but with $399 price point, maybe not.. who knows)

If mass production hasn't began (and I doubt it has, I feel like if it has, Nintendo would have announced to get ahead of leaks), then the window for Q1 is rapidly closing, if not closed completely by now. April, May, and June (Q2) is still in play, IMHO.
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I mean, would they delay it just to have more launch day stock? It's not like that would get Switch 2s into users' hands any faster. It would just result in millions of people having to wait longer, and Nintendo not getting their money.
 
BreakAtmo said:
I mean, would they delay it just to have more launch day stock? It's not like that would get Switch 2s into users' hands any faster. It would just result in millions of people having to wait longer, and Nintendo not getting their money.
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You might be right. I was speculating that Nintendo would want to avoid the scarcity issue as much as possible.

Scarcity issue can be a vicious self-feeding cycle. If not enough units are available on launch day, it would inflate the price of console in secondary markets (eBay etc), scalpers will get more involved, etc. Even with restocks showing up, it's "never going to be enough" for a long time. It's a hard cycle to get out of.
 
Shoulder said:
All I’m thinking regarding storage format is the possibility that Nintendo just opts for all digital, and uses a 2230 nvme drive running at 1x or 2x speeds to help save on power consumption.
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I don't think that necessarily results in acceptable power consumption. The SK Hynix BC501A, a PCIe Gen 3 M.2 2230 NVMe SSD with a max sequential read speed of 1.5 GB/s, has an active power consumption of 2.5 W.

By comparison, Micron said that Micron's UFS 3.1 modules have an active power consumption of 960 mW (0.96 W).
 
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