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.
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.