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They were probably in on it when it was pre-production. This is something that you often want to do as a large customer so that you are as close to the state-of
by rkangel 3y ago
They were probably in on it when it was pre-production. This is something that you often want to do as a large customer so that you are as close to the state-of-the-art as possible, but it comes with downsides! I am doing a similar thing on a project at work at the moment.
- phonon 3y agoThe chip shipped 2 years earlier than the Switch in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Shield_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Shield_TV More likely Nintendo got a really good deal on it.
- rkangel 3y agoYeah, but how long was the Nintendo Switch in development? And bear in mind that we're comparing it to a much simpler bit of Nvidia electronics. It is entirely possible that it was just price based and they didn't care about the chip bug, but given the timings I still think they would have selected the chip before it was complete and in consumer products.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoWell, I think it's important to consider the competition in 2017 was not great. The comparable competitive Android chip, also launched in late 2015, was the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. That chip was widely known as being one of the worst Qualcomm chips ever made; for mediocre power efficiency, lots of heat generation, thermal throttling, and a buggy first attempt at 64-bit instructions. All that for a GPU that is, on paper, significantly weaker [1] (though, maybe the Switch's cooling could've helped close that gap a bit). But even then, you're dealing with Qualcomm, and everyone knows they are just the worst. First, because Qualcomm loves royalties based on the device's MSRP, rather than a flat charge per chip. Nintendo probably wouldn't like that. Secondly, while NVIDIA GPU drivers are a proprietary blob, that's of little concern to Nintendo, and that blob can be easily adapted to run on any OS under the sun, including their own. Qualcomm - enjoy a hackneyed Linux fork, that's the best you'll get. From our perspective they're both pretty bad, but from Nintendo's perspective trying to add support to their custom microkernel Switch OS, one's clearly garbage. Outside of Qualcomm... what else do you have for 2017? Exynos and MediaTek? I think it goes without saying... there are no upsides to passing on the Tegra X1 for a MediaTek from that era. [1] Edit: I previously said 50% and 100% weaker, but that's very grammatically ambiguous; and FLOPs are a very bad metric of performance, because there are 3 different kinds of FLOP metrics floating around that aren't comparable (due to different levels of precision). Combined with the Tegra being designed for cooling and the Qualcomm designed for no cooling, it's hard to tell specifically how large the gap is, even though a gap is almost certainly there. I think my point still stands.
- my123 3y agoThat was the SD810. The SD820 was a lot better
- my123 3y agoBy 2014, the Tegra X1 was already picked as the Switch SoC. From digging at history threads: The alternative SoC option they had was a quad-A53 SoC with Decaf (a Wii U GPU cut in half with Wii backwards compat gone) co-designed with STMicro.
- IntelMiner 3y agoIs there anywhere one can read about those in more detail?
- monocasa 3y agoI'm not sure about reading, but this was an interesting video on the topic linked elsewhere in this thread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZzXidHVvJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZzXidHVvJU
- CopperWing 3y agoNintendo chose Nvidia Tegra X1 when its previous design based on another custom ARM-based SoC failed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZzXidHVvJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZzXidHVvJU