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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (New Staff Post, Please read)
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They can acquire SEGA for starters
HyruleanKnight
I drew my pfp on MS Paint
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I can see Nintendo buying out Xbox, MS would let out a massive sigh of relief to finally get Spencer off their ass
/s
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– MissingNo., BassForever, big lantern ghost, Dardan Sandiego, Deco Returns, IsisStormDragon, karmitt, Lord Azrael, meatbag, NabiscoFelt, ngpdrew, Party Sklar, Tangerine_Cookie, Zellia, Bokuringo, WestEgg
Sure the FTC/ EU etc would be totally cool with that.
I don't think Rockstar holds any reservation about supporting Nintendo. In the past they even went to the extent of developing an exclusive GTA title for the DS.
It's just a matter of ROI or cost-opportunity efficient resource allocation imo. It simply made more sense for them to prioritize Ps/XB/PC over other platforms.
As for GTAV on Switch, although I think in theory it would have been technically possibile, it possibily wouldn't have been cheap to develop, considering:
- The scope of the game
- Their target quality standards for the series (they wouldn't release an half-baked port)
- (Assumption) not necesarrily the PS3/X360 builds of the game are easy to port, maybe a better route would have been to down-port the XBO/PS4/PC version. Even in that case a port would have probably required re-work on a ton of assets.
I'm not saying a port is likely, but I wouldn't completely exclude it either, and definetly not for some kind of Rockstar aversion to Nintendo.
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Darknut85
#TeamRemake
They were okay with Microsoft buying Activision, so why not?/s
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palemire
bing bong singalong
Again, think bigger.
Nintendo should aquire the EU
SoldierDelta
Designated Xenoblade Loremaster
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The FTC looking at Xbox's past closures and understanding they lost their best argument to stop the acquisition:
Shiver Entertainment is a good acquisition btw. I think getting an in-house port-house to get some third parties onto Switch is a neat idea and it aligns with those third-party portfolio hires from Sony. It should pan out well.
Gerald
Bob-omb
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Im think port will happend but after PS and Xbox premiere on what Rockstar is 100% focus and put full effort
Thraktor
"[✄]. [✄]. [✄]. [✄]." -Microsoft
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A non power of 2 channel width is pretty unusual. Also, prepare for bandwidth calculations to get more complicated, as there are non-data bits mixed in there.
NineTailSage
Bob-omb
I do wonder if we will see 1-1.5GB of RAM for OS functionality, plus a portion of the 256GB UFS 3.1 storage as supplemental.
OP
OP
Bluetooth has latency issues. Not a problem for non-real-time applications, but for games, you're gambling if your paired devices want to act right. This is why you don't see wireless gaming headsets use it, but radio instead
New BT versions are made with this in mind though
Bluetooth is getting a huge upgrade for gamers — ultra-low 20ms latency
But you’ll need a Qualcomm Snapdragon device with Bluetooth 5.4
Since both of these are radio/waves, what causes bluetooth latency? As much as I think about it, the only answer that comes to my head is decoding. If you send raw data to bluetooth (does not have to be audio), the latency disappears or is minimized to single digit numbers (basically physical latency instead of digital).Bluetooth has latency issues. Not a problem for non-real-time applications, but for games, you're gambling if your paired devices want to act right. This is why you don't see wireless gaming headsets use it, but radio instead
New BT versions are made with this in mind though
Bluetooth is getting a huge upgrade for gamers — ultra-low 20ms latency
But you’ll need a Qualcomm Snapdragon device with Bluetooth 5.4www.tomsguide.com
OP
OP
That doesn't sound like a good idea at all as far as durability is concerned.
RAM's constantly reading and writing data from the CPU. Therefore, RAM, specifically DRAM, is designed to be very durable.
If Kioxia is any indication for the other UFS 3.1 manufacturers (e.g. Micron, Samsung, etc.), UFS 3.1 is using QLC NAND, which is not known for being durable.
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I can't tell the difference when playing in my living room and I've been pixel peeping for years.
When using my Steam Deck as an 'early' Switch 2 I've been playing recent AAA games at 1080p/1440p with variations of upscaling via FSR2 or dynamic res, targeting 30 FPS with a mix of high to medium settings (and disabling the heavier features like volumetric fog). Hades 2 I've flipped between 1440p and 4K and have had to walk up to the screen to tell the difference, meanwhile I get locked 60 on the former and an unstable 50-60 on the latter.
The end result is an amazing picture on my 4K TV and stable performance - that is more than can be said for most Switch 'impossible' ports. I played two hours of Ghost of Tsushima last night. (Yes yes I am aware of OLED making 30 FPS look 'worse' but this has never meaningfully panned out for me).
We will get inevitable complaints about '1080p' and '30 FPS' from 'core gamers' (mostly, by those just looking at the numbers and not how the game actually feels to play), but I anticipate many a heavy third party game will end up targeting that performance, because that is a reasonable goal when you want to have the image look pretty and maintain parity between two modes.
And I'm absolutely fine with that level of performance minimum if it means I can buy a Switch 2 and get a lion's share of third party games. I expect Nintendo's own games and last-gen ports to reach higher ceilings anyway, so we'll be getting a mix of 1080p/1440p/2160p and hopefully always a stable image.
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HyruleanKnight
I drew my pfp on MS Paint
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Now that you mention it, 256GB on QLC means we're likely looking at very low endurance figures, probably between 50-100 TBW. Considering the costs involved, I'm betting on somewhere between 50 and 60. I wonder if SD cards can be a viable cold storage if we're constantly rewriting the Switch's internal storage for games that cannot be run from the SD card. If physical media (carts) is already acting as cold storage (because I don't believe for a second we'll be running major games off it) it makes little sense to transfer said games to yet another tier of cold storage. Micro SD Express hasn't been released yet and I don't think Nintendo will be banking on a brand new technology like this for the Switch 2. It may end up rather expensive, and we might be looking at a PS Vita 2.0 situation.
I watched MS's Surface tablet video today and noticed their implementation of an easily user accessible SSD slot. They basically hid the slot under a magnetic door, which was then hidden under the kickstand. Getting the SSD out will still require a screwdriver so it isn't completely tool-less, but they're using a M.2 2230 SSD - the same as the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. And then it dawned on me: could the Switch 2 do something similar?
Considering that the Switch 2 tablet area is around 34% larger in the x and y dimensions, and that I don't see what else they could've added to the internal mainboard to make use of all that space, is it realistic to expect a M.2 2230 drive slot like the Surface? Surely all that extra space isn't being 100% dedicated to the battery, or we're hypothetically looking at a roughly doubling of Switch battery size, physically speaking. M.2 2230 SSDs can be had for dirt cheap these days; the 1-2GB/s read speed requirement is really not asking for much.
Edit: Forgot to mention that Kioxia pioneered the BG4 flash chip used in these 2230 SSDs, it's basically the flash and the controller within the same package. If you want to make decent small form-factor SSDs on the cheap, they're the ones to consult.
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NineTailSage
Bob-omb
Question is the Switch was pretty modular in most of its parts, can we see something similar where the UFS storage is also replaceable on a daughter board?
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50-100 lifetime total rewrites sounds... Perfectly reasonable. 
How many times have I done it on my OLED Model, maybe once? Twice? Total across the whole generation, maybe three or four times?
As for expansion and installation, I'd expect Nintendo to continue how it works now as best they can. Games can run straight from Game Card or SDe, and SDe will be available by launch even if it is expensive. I think an inexpensive MicroSD card for cold storage will be an option, like cold storage with harddrives on other consoles. Even in that scenario, can you see yourself copying back and fourth 12TB worth of games over the generation?
How many times have I done it on my OLED Model, maybe once? Twice? Total across the whole generation, maybe three or four times?
As for expansion and installation, I'd expect Nintendo to continue how it works now as best they can. Games can run straight from Game Card or SDe, and SDe will be available by launch even if it is expensive. I think an inexpensive MicroSD card for cold storage will be an option, like cold storage with harddrives on other consoles. Even in that scenario, can you see yourself copying back and fourth 12TB worth of games over the generation?
There's a lot of assumptions here, primarily on game card speeds and Nintendo not using microSD express.
Game card speeds are based more on the controller reading them. Don't know why we are to assume that's going to be slow if there's already a ufs controller. And SDExpress isn't new. It's several years old now. The upcoming cards aren't even the latest standard if I remember correctly
rinku
“The Baby”
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I had asked about this a while back, and it was brought to my attention that NVMe SSDs use considerably more power than the flash storage used normally.
OP
OP
Considering that more than one company (Western Digital, Samsung, etc.) are releasing microSD Express 7.0 cards at least relatively soon, whereas Sony's the only provider for the PlayStation Vita memory cards (a hacked PlayStation Vita is required to use a microSD card adapter for the PlayStation Vita), I'm confident adopting microSD Express 7.0 won't lead to another situation similar to with the PlayStation Vita.
Raccoon
Fox Brigade
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from my memory of my dusty ass computer science degree
cache is the memory on the processor itself. it is dramatically faster than ram and is the storage used in the lowest level (as in most fundamental) computations. this will usually be divided into, and referred to as, the registers
L3 refers to Level 3 of the cache. iirc L1 would be your absolute fastest cache, both more performant and electrically closest to the cores, leading down in speed to 2 and 3. L2 and L3 provide more elbow room, as it were, for the processor at a lower cost (money, space, electricity)
I could be totally off base, I didn't reference wikipedia at all, just my memory. let's see if the smart people correct me
HyruleanKnight
I drew my pfp on MS Paint
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I based my assumption on this: my 2TB SSD which I only use for games50-100 lifetime total rewrites sounds... Perfectly reasonable.
How many times have I done it on my OLED Model, maybe once? Twice? Total across the whole generation, maybe three or four times?
As for expansion and installation, I'd expect Nintendo to continue how it works now as best they can. Games can run straight from Game Card or SDe, and SDe will be available by launch even if it is expensive. I think an inexpensive MicroSD card for cold storage will be an option, like cold storage with harddrives on other consoles. Even in that scenario, can you see yourself copying back and fourth 12TB worth of games over the generation?
The SSD itself is less than 6 months old, and I should mention I disabled virtual memory provisioning for this drive, but it has already had 5.78TB written to it. Games are not a simple one-time install affair anymore these days; there's updates involved, including large, multi-GB patches and some may even re-download the whole thing.
Then you need to consider that the Switch didn't really get a lot of large games, which is probably not going to be the case with the Switch 2. I don't expect to see 100-150GB games, but 50-80GB is pretty common at this point. Ghost of Tsushima is a perfect example of a PS4 game that is still almost 70GB. In a different universe I could see GoT running on the Switch 2 with the highest texture quality because it has more than enough memory to do it, so I doubt they would be doing any sort of content reduction. Applying that same logic to major multi-platform releases on the Switch 2 in this universe, that 50 TBW endurance will wear out a lot faster than you think.
HyruleanKnight
I drew my pfp on MS Paint
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Bad wording on my part, my bad. I meant the newly announced ones that can apparently get upto 800MB/s sequential speeds.
HyruleanKnight
I drew my pfp on MS Paint
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Fair, which is why I specifically mentioned BG4. They use significantly less power and can deliver the intended performance on the cheap. Though looking at the big picture, the total power consumption of these smaller, slower SSDs probably won't be eating into the power budget as much as we think - it's not like they will be active 100% of the time.
HyruleanKnight
I drew my pfp on MS Paint
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I see. I still can't help feeling uncomfortable about Nintendo relying heavily on such newly announced tech that will most certainly become a necessity because 256GB isn't going to cut it for most people from day 1.
indospot
Process Truster
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I'm with you on this to some extent, though these cards are launching this year and Switch 2 is in 2025. In the tech industry, that's a decent amount of time for prices to come down. We also don't know how much they'll even cost at launch so who knows. I'm open to it but we'll see.
SiG
Chain Chomp
Considering the ubiquity of the SD card ecosystem, I'd say it's less likely to become an issue than Sony's MemorySticks did with Vita.
There will probably be a minimum capacity or speed requirement enforced in the memory cards to ensure loading errors or hitches don't become a thing. (This will probably be an automated task and will be checked for when formatting a brand new microSD card to be used for the successor. If the microSD card don't meet the specified requirements, the user will be informed that it cannot be formatted.)
OP
OP
As Raccoon already mentioned, larger capacity cache is much more expensive due to requiring more die space, especially with scaling down SRAM (which cache is) being practically at a standstill with newer process nodes (e.g. TSMC's N3E process node).
And larger capacity cache beyond a certain point can also increase latency due to the increased amount of time required to search for data in a larger capacity cache.
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The Nintendo ecosystem is not PC. It also has dedicated decompression hardware. Unless you're literally buying every AAA release and reinstalling them regularly, you're not going to double up the capacity every few months.
In your example, something I'd consider extreme, and something in the PC ecosystem, even at that sort of storage use month in and month out, that pans out to YEARS of longevity.
But most people aren't buying and/or reinstalling AAA games every month, they just aren't! Those years become decades for the "average user", even if you count, say, my real world storage use on Xbox with Game Pass (I don't even pay per installation!) as 'average'. In that context, I've only ever had one game totally reinstall itself to update. Once. In three and a half years, and it was a next gen upgrade! Xbox Series X I think is probably a good point of comparison, since the Switch Successor will be more akin to the 9th gen home consoles, not the PS4, and of course, unlike a PC, it is a console, and with decompression capabilities.
I just don't think it'll be a problem for a console environment.
OP
OP
Yeah, with all of the power efficiency improvements JEDEC is touting with LPDDR6, Nintendo has absolutely no reason to support LPDDR5X-10700 for a hypothetical T239 die shrink, especially since JEDEC doesn't officially support LPDDR5X-10700.
RennanNT
Bob-omb
Imagine an office worker who has to read and write hundreds of documents.
There's a storage room, filled with millions of documents. That worker goes there every morning, get thousands of documents from there they will need for the day and put them all in his office room's shelf.
Now he gets a handful of documents, take to his desk, do his work and then go to the next batch of documents.
But that means they have to go to the shelf hundreds of times a day, which is slow and inefficient. So he starts getting a hundred of docs putting into the desk's drawers. Now he only has to go a few dozens of times.
To be even more efficient, he buy an additional drawer. He has to stretch himself to reach it, but it's still much faster than going to the shelf. The guy working near him cam also reach it, so it speeds up tasks which involves both of them.
The office worker is a CPU core, the desktop is the cache L1 (level 1), the desk drawers are cache L2, the extra drawer is cache L3, the shelf is the RAM, the storage room is... this is going to shock you... the storage. They're all an hierarchy of speed vs space memories.
As for how big 8mb is? AMD put 32 in their GPU and called that "Infinity Cache" because of how big that was.
Im honestly kind of doubting T239 will get a die shrink, assuming its starting out on 4nm.
1: the effeciency boost woudnt be anywhere near what they got with Mariko.
2: Due to Sram shrink stagnation, it woudnt be much cheaper either. Right?
OP
OP
Yeah, the cost savings won't be as significant as in the past.
And in the past, I was talking about transitioning from TSMC's 4N process node to TSMC's N3E process node, which does require effectively a re-design since TSMC's N3E process node is not IP compatible with TSMC's 4N process node, which I imagine is a nontrivial percentage of the total costs.
Of course, that was before TSMC announced TSMC's N4C process node, which TSMC advertises up to a 8.5% die shrink, which I assume is for a chip designed with 50% logic, 30% SRAM, and 20% analog, and should be IP compatible with TSMC's 4N process node.
So although I still don't expect a significant die shrink and significant cost savings, especially if T239 is designed closer to 70% SRAM and 30% logic, and significant power efficiency improvements, at least the costs of re-designing should be eliminated with TSMC's N4C process node.
Upgrading the RAM controller requires another tape out of the SoC anyway. So considering JEDEC is touting a power efficiency mode for LPDDR6, I imagine Nintendo could have the RAM frequency be exactly the same (3750 MHz or 7500 MT/s) as Nintendo upgrades the RAM controller from a LPDDR5X controller to a LPDDR6 controller to achieve at the very least some power efficiency improvements.
SwitchEmUp
Piranha Plant
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I just realised, Strix Point (16-20CU) and the Switch 2 will realistically be neck and neck with each other performance wise. But it's likely that the Switch 2 will be cheaper and have better Ray Tracing performance
There won't be one.
RennanNT
Bob-omb
If Nintendo didn't think Switch needed one, the likely answer is "there won't be one for NG either".
But if they decide to do it, they can go bulkier like handheld PCs or use more expensive components (higher density for batteries and more efficiency for other parts). Or both.
Shoulder
Koopa
I was thinking about this earlier. The current OS for the Switch, while still barebones, does provide some useful features that we just expect. So for example, you can pause your game by hitting the Home button, putting the game into a save state until the execution is called to either continue playing the game, or stop it entirely to load another app. That alone for me was huge, especially compared to the Wii U, which used even more ram for the OS. So clearly, Nintendo learned a few things from the Wii U, and probably 3DS when designing the OS, and overall footprint for the Switch.
Given how custom t239 is in relation to the X1, which is off the shelf for the most part, Nintendo might be planning on adding additional features, though not to the extent we think, but the OS footprint might be similar in the end, along with improvements such as a better eShop app, plus the use of AV1 encoding/decoding. Though, if you think of this in terms of allocation percentages, the Switch OS uses 22.1% of the Switch's entire 4GB ram. (907MB / 4096MB = 22.1%)
With 12GB of Ram on tap, that would be 12,288MB, and if we use the same 22.1% allocation the Switch 1 uses, that comes out to a rather massive 2,715MB for the OS and all its function, which if I’m honest, don’t see Nintendo utilizing THAT much. If say somehow the Switch 2 the exact same amount of ram for its OS as Switch 1 (907MB), that's only 7.4% of the total Ram available for the system.
So it’s safe to say the Switch 2 will use somewhere between 907 - 2715MB for its OS. Don’t think it'll go any lower, or higher than that range.
EDIT: That said, say it really did use 2715MB for the OS, that's still 9573MB available for developers, or a good 3x more in quantity, plus all the efficiency, and speed improvements that come with LPDDR5x over LPDDR4.
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Necroxid
Rattata
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I imagined something like this:
NSO + Expansion Pack: free upgrade (no need to be subscribed once got the upgrade)
NSO: 10$/€ upgrade (same as above)
Not subscribed: full price
HyruleanKnight
I drew my pfp on MS Paint
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Strix Point will have upto 16 CUs only, afaik. Switch 2 will still be a lot more power efficient, for obvious reasons, but we'll most likely see the portable performance crown of the Switch 2 not lasting for very long. Not that it matters, Nintendo will continue to truck along in their own terms, and better performance is a good thing for everyone.
Valve has not bothered with upgrading the Steam deck this whole time because they too have been waiting for a genuine performance/watt uplift. I can see a Steam Deck 2 announcement some time in 2025, it's long overdue and the tech will be available en masse.
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