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

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Hermii said:
Hard to pay attention these days. Is there anything lately to suggest 8nm?
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Besides being ampere based, derivative of an existing 8nm SOC, only Ada Lovelace being on TSMC 4nm and only the data center GPUs being on 7nm TSMC? No.

Just dropping that the GA107 chip has twice the SM of Drake on paper, but it’s about the size of the Steam deck APU. That chip can fit in the switch space more or less.

So it’s cold water on the “it’s not on 8nm” train. And to only expect 8nm.
ILikeFeet said:
I still don't expect lower clocks than the Switch. and then I expect the cpu to be clocked higher at ~1.25GHz all core minimum
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That’s probably a bit high still for 8nm if it’s 8 cores.

Unless they clock the GPU very low, and have a denser battery this time.
 
Polygon said:
With the way the industry is going it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Game Pass and the new PlayStation Plus Premium service came to the next Switch tbh as MS and Sony probably view Nintendo in the same light as PC meaning it’s a platform that doesn’t directly compete with their platform so why not get those players paying you a subscription.

The tough part will be giving Nintendo a large enough taste of that subscription for them to bite. If they offer half the subscription fee to Nintendo it will be very attractive indeed. Halo, Gears, Forza, God of War, Gran Turismo and Horizon on the go on top of Nintendo exclusives all with good image quality would be awesome.
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Game Pass on Drake was one of my...well, not dreams, but longshot potential pleasant surprises that I dared not mention. Hadn't even considered Sony's (probably cause my physical PS4 backlog is intimidating enough).
 
Thugstas said:
I would say both were interdependent
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I see, thank you
9-Volt said:
RDR1's code is notoriously a mess. It won't come anywhere else unless it had a engine migration.

And yes, Stephen Totilo is one of the most respected reporters in the industry. He'd never share something like that if there wasn't any truth behind it.
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Great, I didn't know Stephen Totilo.
Too bad about RDR1...never played it. ☹️
 
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9-Volt said:
RDR1's code is notoriously a mess. It won't come anywhere else unless it had a engine migration.

And yes, Stephen Totilo is one of the most respected reporters in the industry. He'd never share something like that if there wasn't any truth behind it.
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Take 2 has been a huge supporter of the Switch and more importantly what they have released on it have often done quite well, it would shock me if no internal tests/discussions occured on porting either, one or both of these games to Switch.
 
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ReddDreadtheLead said:
Besides being ampere based, derivative of an existing 8nm SOC, only Ada Lovelace being on TSMC 4nm and only the data center GPUs being on 7nm TSMC? No.

Just dropping that the GA107 chip has twice the SM of Drake on paper, but it’s about the size of the Steam deck APU. That chip can fit in the switch space more or less.

So it’s cold water on the “it’s not on 8nm” train. And to only expect 8nm.

That’s probably a bit high still for 8nm if it’s 8 cores.

Unless they clock the GPU very low, and have a denser battery this time.
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all the more reason I don't think it'll be 8nm. cpu is one of the things that hamper both Nintendo's devs and third parties.

and Nvidia isn't shy to various flavors of uarches. Pascal was on two different nodes by different fabs; there were 3 flavors of Maxwell, one of which was Pascal-lite, and Ampere is also on two different nodes by different fabs. I don't see why Drake couldn't be an Ampere cooked in Lovelace sauce on TSMC 5nm
 
ReddDreadtheLead said:
The GA107 Die is about ~167mm^2 and has 24SMs

Drake would have half as many so it would be at least ~80mm^2 solely to the GPU

4-8 CPU cores (big and/or LITTLE) would be about, er, 30-50mm^2?

This would be about the size of the Steam Deck APU.

So, it’s most likely 8nm.


And thus, expect very low clocks.
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Do you have a source on this? The only source I could find after some quick googling puts GA107 at 200mm^2.


And Van Gogh at 163mm.
 
Stinky Horse said:
Do you have a source for 24SMs?
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There’s this: https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/1...e-nvidia-cuts-down-to-the-a2-accelerator/amp/

To be precise, the GA107 used in the A2 accelerator has only 10 of its 24 SMs, 10 of its 40 Tensor Cores, and 48 of its 96 RT cores fired up. Its peak power draw drops from 250 watts to 60 watts, and then customers can customize it with software tuning to run as low as 40 watts – with a consequent further lowering of performance, of course.
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But also, none of the NVidia SKUs for gaming make full use of the die, parts of them are disabled for yield reasons even more so at the lower end. It’s not hard to believe that even the 3050 has SMs disabled for it.

Hermii said:
Do you have a source on this? The only source I could find after some quick googling puts GA107 at 200mm^2.
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I outright saw the die itself, it’s smaller than that 200 number and the same as the GDDR6 RAM module which is about ~160 or so mm^2.

GDDR6 is 12mmx14mm.
 
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ILikeFeet said:
I don't see why Drake couldn't be an Ampere cooked in Lovelace sauce on TSMC 5nm
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Depends on when Nintendo and Nvidia made a decision on which process node to use for fabricating Drake. That being said, I think TSMC's N6 process node is a possibility, probably more so than TSMC's 4N process node (which is based on TSMC's N5P process node), I think.
 
8nm should be reasonable enough and also pretty cheap. Docked x Portable difference will also be higher this time, specially if Nintendo stays at a 720p target while portable while docked targets 4K/1440p/1080p. So you wouldn't need crazy clocks while in portable mode.

I do worry for the CPU though. Hopefully they settled for 8x A78 with 1.2 - 1.4 GHz range.
 
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ReddDreadtheLead said:
There’s this: https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/1...e-nvidia-cuts-down-to-the-a2-accelerator/amp/




But also, none of the NVidia SKUs for gaming make full use of the die, parts of them are disabled for yield reasons even more so at the lower end. It’s not hard to believe that even the 3050 has SMs disabled for it.


I outright saw the die itself, it’s smaller than that 200 number and the same as the GDDR6 RAM module which is about ~160 or so mm^2.

GDDR6 is 12mmx14mm.
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The main 3050 has 1/3 disabled because it doesn't even use a ga107, so I am sceptical of the rest of what that site says, I've never seen it said that there is more than 20 anywhere else.
 
Stinky Horse said:
The main 3050 has 1/3 disabled because it doesn't even use a ga107, so I am sceptical of the rest of what that site says, I've never seen it said that there is more than 20 anywhere else.
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NextPlatform is a very reliable website. Also, GA107 is used for RTX 3050/Ti mobile, RTX 2050 and MX570. Supposedly Nvidia would change the die of the RTX 3050 Desktop from GA106 to 107 later, but haven't done yet.
 
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PashArcade said:
If that's the case, how are they planning to differentiate the device from their revisions when it's the time to move on to a new generation? I think it will be important to know, since not everyone is able/willing to buy every single revisions every 2 years
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It's already been happening for decades without being much problem. To a totally uninformed party, DSi and 3DS probably seem equally plausible as names for revisions or successors to DS. Same uninformed party probably wouldn't be sure whether Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance came first.
 
Dakhil said:
Depends on when Nintendo and Nvidia made a decision on which process node to use for fabricating Drake. That being said, I think TSMC's N6 process node is a possibility, probably more so than TSMC's 4N process node (which is based on TSMC's N5P process node), I think.
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I think Drake was made to be on a smaller node from teh start. if Dane was an earlier offshoot of Orin, it might have been 8nm, but they they shifted gears to a smaller node
 
Hermii said:
I’m just setting my expectations at 8nm with ultra low clocks. And anything else is a bonus.
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Can a SoC with 12 SMs on a 8nm node even reasonably fit within the same sized casing as the current Switch? It seems like they would have to go to TSMC's 5nm node to get this SoC into a case the same size as the current Switch.
 
My Tulpa said:
AAA 3rd party gaming enthusiasts who will spend $500 on new hardware are the type who own multiple systems and/or invest in the 3rd party gaming system with the best fidelity/performance possible and the best online/services community as possible.

This will never be a Nintendo machine, not even the Switch.

I think people severely overestimate the appeal of playing a big AAA multiplat on a 7” 720p screen portable. Sure, there are gamers who who would love to play Red Dead Redemption 2 only portable and never play the Xbox/pc/ps version…but it isn’t that large. The majority market of that kind of game is elsewhere

I’m absolutely welcome to be proven wrong on this! But I haven’t been swayed yet. Only people theorizing about it.

If Red Dead Redemption 2 gets a Drake only port, I bet it wouldnt sell much more than 1 million tbh. Certainly nowhere near 3 million. And it really does seem if publishers of these big games don’t feel the promise of at least 3 million lifetime sales is there, they don’t put time/effort in a port for that platform. Pc/Xbox/ps has the promise of these minimums, no matter the userbase size. Even a Nintendo machine with 100 million userbase you are lucky if your multiplat port gets close to 3 million in sales.

I don’t think the power of Drake docked will change this much, tbh.



I do believe there will be 3rd party Drake exclusives, of course there will be. I just question what type they are. The genre, how many other platforms it’s on already, what Drake will offer that all the other platforms it’s on doesn’t…etc

As for RDR2 being on Switch and only playable on the Drake? I have to see it to believe it. Supposedly Rockstar doesn’t think the effort to remaster GTA4 and RDR for the big 3rd party platforms is worth the return. If that’s true, porting a major game to just the low userbase Drake platform has to be the very LAST of their dev porting priorities lol



Multiple excellent Mario games were on the portable option at the time.

The problem with the Wii U was that it didn’t get enough 1st party gaming and 3rd party exclusive gaming support at all. Nintendo and other were divided in supporting multiple different Nintendo systems at the same time.

No amount of COD or AC or FIFA releases on the Wii U would have pushed hardware sales.

Making the Wii U the only place to play Zelda and Mario and Pokémon games? Not 3ds? I think you’d be surprised how much the Wii U would have sold. Even with the U in its name lol



You mentioned 3rd party games that are console exclusive to Nintendo machines lol…of course they help drive sales, I said as much.

We are talking about big multiplats that sell very well on pc/Xbox/ps.



Yes. Again, how well is Stardew Valley selling on Xbox and PlayStation?

There are absolutely 3rd party games that can compete against Nintendo 1st party games on Nintendo systems. Lego games will never miss a Nitnendo platform, for example.

We aren’t talking about those. We are talking about the “support” people always lament Nintendo machines never get enough of. We are talking about “support” people are saying Drake power is going to get Switch that the earlier models never got.

Also, I disagree that Stardew Valley pushed any Switch hardware. I would argue that Switch software pushed Stardew Valley sales on the Switch. Stardew Valley is a game that is very complimentary with the 1st party games that actually drive Switch sales. People pick up Switch for Animal Crossing and then get interested in trying Stardew Valley. Not the other way around.
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This is a hardware speculation thread, not a sales one. And don’t worry about being “swayed”- I don’t think anyone cares about that as much as you seem to think.
 
SiG said:
We've been talking alot about GPU nodes, but what about CPUs? Are we deadlocked to one flavour of ARM Cortex-A78? Wouldn't die shrinks also apply to the CPU?
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If it's A78C it's locked to 8Cores max due to the DSU. Newer nodes benefits would be either for better energy-efficiency or higher clocks.
 
ILikeFeet said:
I think Drake was made to be on a smaller node from teh start. if Dane was an earlier offshoot of Orin, it might have been 8nm, but they they shifted gears to a smaller node
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TSMC's N6 process node happens to be noticeably smaller than and is almost as (if not as) mature as Samsung's 8N process node (since TSMC's N6 process node share the same design rules as TSMC's N7 process node), which means higher yields, which I imagine is important for high volume chips, which I think Drake is.
Sol said:
Can a SoC with 12 SMs on a 8nm node even reasonably fit within the same sized casing as the current Switch? It seems like they would have to go to TSMC's 5nm node to get this SoC into a case the same size as the current Switch.
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Going by Thraktor's rough estimations, yes, although not necessarily ideal. And Thraktor's rough estimations also suggests that Drake can fit in the Nintendo Switch's form factor if fabricated using TSMC's N6 process node. (The Tegra X1 was fabricated using TSMC's 20 nm** process node and is ~118 mm².)

** → a marketing nomenclature used by all foundry companies
 
Teal'c said:
In about 4 minutes it lost 3% battery life. 😬🥶
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That's what you're getting when you're maxing it out, a little bit under 2h of play.

BUT, that's the nice part about PC gaming, you're doing things how you want:
  • same settings as he used (which btw are over what PS4 uses) with frames capped to 30 I get ~2.5h of gameplay;
  • low settings preset, frames capped at 30 ~3h of gameplay;
  • low settings, lower the resolution and enable FSR, you can get even more, but you sacrifice a bit of graphical fidelity.
Love how the "little" thing plays and the fact that I don't need to pay 40-60$ to play 5-10yo games on a portable device.


And this chip is not even the latest existing tech (Zen2 RDNA3), imagine what Nvidia can do with Drake and DLSS (if Nintendo is smart enough to listen).
 
Dakhil said:
TSMC's N6 process node happens to be noticeably smaller than and is almost as (if not as) mature as Samsung's 8N process node (since TSMC's N6 process node share the same design rules as TSMC's N7 process node), which means higher yields, which I imagine is important for high volume chips, which I think Drake is.

Going by Thraktor's rough estimations, yes, although not necessarily ideal. And Thraktor's rough estimations also suggests that Drake can fit in the Nintendo Switch's form factor if fabricated using TSMC's N6 process node. (The Tegra X1 was fabricated using TSMC's 20 nm** process node and is ~118 mm².)

** → a marketing nomenclature used by all foundry companies
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According to Reddreads estimations on the last page, it would be a lot smaller than Thraktors estimation.
 
Pavolink said:
So, are we feeling nearby the announcement? Like, this month? 🤔
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Maybe,if it releases this year July/early August is when it would get announced but that is the only reason to think there would be a hardware event near if we expect it to release late 22. (there is also the partner direct in late June in the place of the e3 direct but that could be for non-hardware reasons)
 
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ILikeFeet said:
using the 32GB AGX model as a reference (it has 256 more cores than Drake), 930.75MHz is the max gpu frequency. however an unknown amount of power is taken up by the DLA cores (1.4GHz), those DLA controllers (742MHz), and PVA cores (704MHz and 486.4MHz). potential clocks could be higher
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I think I remember someone noting 1300 MHz for the Drake model after the breach. I forgot where they got that from. Maybe because the high end 64 GB AGX model has a similar clock speed.

Yeah I think it's possible, notably if Drake does uses a better node like 6nm TSMC. Will be interesting to see how they balance out the CPU speeds with the GPU, and the watt usage. 1 TFLOP handheld would me amazing of course.

Gonna keep my expectations low though (Was thinking 920Hz for GPU) myself 😅.

if Drake is 2.8 TFLOPs at max clocks and it uses up to 30 watts (not counting stuff it doesn't need)... Then maybe at 8nm we can expect something similar to Switch's GPU clockspeed (768 GHz). If we get something like 0.9-1 and 2.3 TFLOPs for handheld/docked for GPU, i will be okay with it. I dunno about CPU. Obviously 8 and the higher the better..
I hope they focus on matching OG's battery power of 3 hours, and then match v2's for a revision.
 
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Pavolink said:
So, are we feeling nearby the announcement? Like, this month? 🤔
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It feels like the most likely release date at this point is March 2023 along with BotW 2.

If so then I think it will be revealed at either The Game Awards in early December or more likely a January event like the original Switch reveal event. Revealing in December will hurt some Xmas sales which is why I think they’ll reveal it in January along with the first footage of the next 3D Mario. The Game Awards has an enormous audience though so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it revealed there.
 
My Tulpa said:
Just curious.
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do me a favor, if you're asking a question and you say you're "just curious", and you actually know the answer already, can you just make your point instead of smugly trying to get them to make your point for you?

If you actually don't know the answer to this, though, I might recommend you google it instead of waiting for someone else to respond.
 
Hermii said:
@ReddDreadtheLead

@Thraktor​


How come your size estimates are so different?
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I mean, for one his accounts for a whopping 4MB L2 cache, Drake doesn’t have 4MB it seems.

It looks like it has 1MB of L2 cache.

For two, I may be mixing the 107S with 107.

Third, he left a very glaring caveat about his estimation :p. Even admitting he isn’t an expert and it’s just that, an estimate.

4th, I think the post you are referring to was pertaining to using a transistor size (example used 10.5BTr) and he worked from there, rather than the other way around.
 
Pavolink said:
So, are we feeling nearby the announcement? Like, this month? 🤔
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October at the earliest

SiG said:
We've been talking alot about GPU nodes, but what about CPUs? Are we deadlocked to one flavour of ARM Cortex-A78? Wouldn't die shrinks also apply to the CPU?
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Given when we think this started development, the A78 is really the only reasonable option. The A710 isn't that much of an improvement to shift gears I think
 
Nice to meet you said:
This new hardware could have some kind of SSD, because 2-3 minutes of loading would bury all graphics and fps improvement.
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Switch already sorta has a solid state drive, its CPU is the main bottleneck for loading. The actual storage speed is much faster than PS4/XB1.
 
Nice to meet you said:
This new hardware could have some kind of SSD, because 2-3 minutes of loading would bury all graphics and fps improvement.
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Loading from a cartridge or from flash storage is alredy faster than HDD. The rate limiter for most games on switch is decompression, which is usually CPU limited.
 
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KMStwo said:
I'm in this train as well, but i expect a tease or a note like "New Nintendo hardware is in preparation, more news in 2023" in October then a full blowout in January or February for a March or April release.
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we will have the announcement of the gameloop to wait according to what I have seen in the messages
 
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poop said:
do me a favor, if you're asking a question and you say you're "just curious", and you actually know the answer already, can you just make your point instead of smugly trying to get them to make your point for you?

If you actually don't know the answer to this, though, I might recommend you google it instead of waiting for someone else to respond.
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I don't get why people do that thing where they want someone else to make a point for them. Lol
 
Skittzo said:
Switch already sorta has a solid state drive, its CPU is the main bottleneck for loading. The actual storage speed is much faster than PS4/XB1.
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Oh yeah, I forgot to post these here:
rzvsZY0_d.webp

That's a benchmark I ran on my launch Switch's internal storage. For those unfamiliar, MiB is mebibytes, which is based on powers of 2 instead of 10 (it's a touch larger than a megabyte). The sequential reads often exceed the 250 MB eMMC is rated to top out at, but the random read performance is a bit rough.

For those curious, here's an SD card benchmark:
ZpQ7OmM_d.webp

That's pretty much the best you're going to get out of the Switch's UHS-I, non-A2 class reader. Some cards can get better random read performance, but this is already meeting A1 standards, so you're kinda just playing the SD lottery to find a card that exceeds its listed specs (though I've heard the Samsung Evo cards do quite well). This was the card I benchmarked: https://a.co/d/1ACSfq5

Figured this thread may enjoy these numbers. No, I don't have a way to benchmark game cards. Maybe if I learned how to write a storage benchmark, I could write my own homebrew...
 
Polygon said:
It feels like the most likely release date at this point is March 2023 along with BotW 2.

If so then I think it will be revealed at either The Game Awards in early December or more likely a January event like the original Switch reveal event. Revealing in December will hurt some Xmas sales which is why I think they’ll reveal it in January along with the first footage of the next 3D Mario. The Game Awards has an enormous audience though so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it revealed there.
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I wonder, if it's as costy as it's shaping up to be maybe they'll want to reveal it early to let people do some saving.
 
Nice to meet you said:
This new hardware could have some kind of SSD, because 2-3 minutes of loading would bury all graphics and fps improvement.
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The switch already uses an SSD though :p, as that’s just flash storage. Some follow a protocol such as the NVMe protocol, but they all use flash storage. eUFS is another protocol format for a fast SSD.

What you mean is a faster SSD.

Which, tbh? It’s tricky. Nothing really points to it.
 
ReddDreadtheLead said:
The switch already uses an SSD though :p, as that’s just flash storage. Some follow a protocol such as the NVMe protocol, but they all use flash storage. eUFS is another protocol format for a fast SSD.

What you mean is a faster SSD.

Which, tbh? It’s tricky. Nothing really points to it.
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Yea but even if it’s the exact same speed as switch 1, it should be a lot faster in real world because that’s bottlenecked by the cpu.
 
Jersh said:
Oh yeah, I forgot to post these here:
rzvsZY0_d.webp

That's a benchmark I ran on my launch Switch's internal storage. For those unfamiliar, MiB is mebibytes, which is based on powers of 2 instead of 10 (it's a touch larger than a megabyte). The sequential reads often exceed the 250 MB eMMC is rated to top out at, but the random read performance is a bit rough.

For those curious, here's an SD card benchmark:
ZpQ7OmM_d.webp

That's pretty much the best you're going to get out of the Switch's UHS-I, non-A2 class reader. Some cards can get better random read performance, but this is already meeting A1 standards, so you're kinda just playing the SD lottery to find a card that exceeds its listed specs (though I've heard the Samsung Evo cards do quite well). This was the card I benchmarked: https://a.co/d/1ACSfq5

Figured this thread may enjoy these numbers. No, I don't have a way to benchmark game cards. Maybe if I learned how to write a storage benchmark, I could write my own homebrew...
Click to expand...
games rely more on random reads so getting storage with faster random reads would be most important. as for SD Cards, there are faster types, but no one even uses those so they're not really made
 
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