we have different interpretations on levels of significant. Textbook says anything noteworthy or sufficiently greater, so somewhat open to interpretation.
Online Textbook definition: Sufficiently great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy
It doesn't need to be a generational leap in power. I think 2-3x times is definitely considered significant and agree that PS4 is significantly stronger than Switch, especially it will put perform it in every way 3.5x or more in CPU, GPU, and bandwidth.
Heck, At the minimum, xbone vs PS4 performance could be considered "significant," since you will see PS4 outperform in everyway overall. But I won't bore further with semantics. We can agree to disagree.
Let’s put it this way, there is not a single noteworthy increase from the Nintendo Wii U to the Nintendo switch, point blank period.
New architecture? Yes, newer features? Yes, I’m not denying this before anyone thinks I do.
But largely the switch has just fulfilled the purpose of being a “Nintendo Wii U pro” and is a bit better at doing everything than the Nintendo Wii U.
let’s put it this way, the increase between Switch and Wii U is similar to the increase that the Wii had over the GameCube. Twice the memory bandwidth, more memory too but not “significantly” so. 43MB to 88MB non unified is a similar increase that 2GB to 4GB is. A CPU that is a bit more performant but it’s still very much limited, and GPU that is not sufficiently fed to do what it’s capable of doing but it is twice as fast.
It’s the same position but better at doing the same job. And no one considers the Wii a significant leap whatsoever over the GameCube.
And before I get the inevitable comment, I’m talking about a Nintendo switch here, I’m not talking about the tegra X1, I’m talking about the device that Nintendo presented to
you and how they have kept presenting it to you, the consumer, who buys it and buys games on it.
The device has largely targeted a level performance that is not “significantly better than the Wii U“ but it
is better in a way where it is good enough to most where they see this improvement over the Wii U, or not.
And please, keep note, I’m
strictly referring to the level of
performance here. And whenever I referred to the tick and the tock cadence, I’m referring strictly to the paradigm of development. They refined and they moved forward. And it’s just a
pet theory of mine. If people consider something like “1.2-1.5 times” (THIS IS FOR EXAMPLE PURPOSES) the performance to be significant so be it, but that is such a pathetic increase to even entertain the conversation surrounding that.
And I know someone, some of you, do you consider that to be some significant performance sleep. Quite frankly I do not because it will still look pretty much the same to me. If it doesn’t look like something changed enough or I’m wowed by the change then it simply was not significant to me.
Forgot to comment on the bolded for the readers. Strictly speaking, that's not something that can be generalized. What a particular processor's memory controller supports can be highly variable and one will have to check on a individual product/SKU basis. For example,
this Comet Lake laptop chip supports DDR4/LPDDR3/LPDDR4. But
this Comet Lake laptop apparently only supports DDR4. Ooh, or another, more recent example, let's look at Alder Lake-U i5 SKUs.
1235U and
1245U list support for DDR4/DDR5/LPDDR4X/LPDDR5.
1230U and
1240U list support for LPDDR4X and LPDDR5.
Oh, yea, I forgot to comment on this back when it came up before, but no, don't expect an SKU to get 'updated' to 'support' higher memory speeds. Memory speed support is a promise/warranty from the manufacturer that memory of this type up to so and so speed will work. Something goes wrong, that's their responsibility. You go over this speed and something goes wrong, that's your responsibility (read as: the common advice is that if you call Intel for support and they ever ask about the usage of XMP,
feign ignorance). Anyway, I'd expect that updated/improved memory controller (and more specifically, higher formally supported speeds) would imply a new SKU. If for nothing else but to keep it simple for warranty purposes.
I am aware that silicon can have multiple memory controllers for different types of RAM, but specifically for this context the switch Drake will not have more than one memory controller most likely because this is extra complexity to the silicon. If it only has the memory controller for LPDDR5, it can’t just be swapped easily. The memory controller for LPDDR5 would only work with LPDDR5. The aforementioned 6800u in my post in the post for example has DDR5 and LPDDR5 support, but I only focused on the LPDDR5 because I was related to the context of what we were discussing which is switching from 5 to 5X. 6800u can support DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory, but it can’t support LPDDR5X memory because it doesn’t have a memory controller for that. It only has memory controller for two types of ram.
If AMD updates the silicon to have more than just LPDDR5/DDR5 memory compatibility such as DDR4 or adds LPDDR4X and LPDDR5X, then yes but I didn’t really find those to be relevant for the sake of conversation.
