Jessmo24 said:
I found this. In trying to get someone to adopt my post. It's interesting.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.euro...for-the-nintendo-nvidia-partnership-in-theory
hardware inside it?
Well, back in the day, a leak emerged from the Foxconn factory where the Switch was being manufactured. In some respects, the information provided was inaccurate - it put forward the idea of a much more powerful processor - but elsewhere, specifically in terms of the physical description of the machine and its innards, it proved 100 per cent accurate. And there is discussion in that leak of an 'advanced dev kit', which appears to feature 8GB of RAM, and a processor that's about the same size as the GP106 Nvidia chip found inside the GeForce GTX 1060. And on top of that, another processor - about the same size as the Switch's Tegra - is also described.
As far as I know, this enhanced Switch was real, but Switch's current success was completely unexpected. Nintendo originally planned to release multiple form factors around this architecture, the problem is, Iwata himself stated that ultimately the customers would decide if Nintendo needed 1 form factor going forward, and Switch has been selling at it's current price to both the handheld and console crowd without restraint, so the answer is that 1 form factor can indeed serve both markets and they will likely never release a standalone handheld or console, even if they release a Switch mini, it will likely still dock to the TV, although I could see them selling a dock and controller separately, as the joycons would not come along for the ride and the device would not have removable controllers, this type of device though won't see the light of day for years though, Nintendo can clearly see the need to give customers a device like this to expand their market, but it would ruin the main draw of the current Switch units, which is the play anywhere style and Switching between TV and handheld form factors. I wouldn't expect this until 2020 at the earliest and a more powerful Switch in 2019 is more likely, based on Volta would be a better bet than Pascal, though I can see them waiting for 2021 for such a device, but if I was Nintendo, this would be the time I'd release a 4K dock to compete with PS5 and XB5. Even if the PS5 launches in 2020, PS4 will have games released for the following 2 years, that means 3rd parties will still support Switch in it's current form through 2022, an enhanced dock in 2021 would allow them to continue to support the current Switch model, which would push a 2 hour battery life when on the go and increase it's handheld clock speed to 768mhz and a full 393GFLOPs, this is a doubling of the GPU performance and all current Switch chips run in this clock speed and the cooling solution already handles this TDP, so it's a free performance upgrade that costs customers a hour of battery life to play these mid gen games 4 to 5 years into the Switch's life.
The enhanced dock specs would likely match the GTX 1060, this is enough to run docked Switch games targeting 720p in full 4k (>9x increase in flops, 8GB VRAM) this would match the XB1X in performance. (BTW I've been seeing reviews of the XB1X saying that it is equivalent to a GTX 1080, AMD doesn't actually even have a GPU that matches the GTX 1080 atm, so this is just rubbish journalism from people who sell company's PR marketing, seriously the flops are even shy of the GTX 1070, and Nvidia has a serious flop advantage as well, it's all ignored /end_rant) The SCD in the form of an enhanced dock could sell for $199 or even cheaper in 2020-2021 and offer that performance, while the CPU can ramp up clock speeds to at least 1.9GHz, which would blow away the jaguar cores in these devices, ports would become much easier as the VRAM bandwidth would be much higher in the dock and allow for seriously impressive visuals, meanwhile the increase in clock speeds in the portable, would allow the game to come over with current downgrades we see in the docked versions of these games, all current games could keep their portable clocks as well, with their current battery life.
Volta Switch units would sit around base PS4's performance, it could shoot for 768GFLOPs in portable and sit just below XB1 on the go and push 1.536TFLOPs when docked. Mixed precision would bring these numbers up over 1TFLOPs and 2TFLOPs respectively but even in FP32 would match up well to the current gen consoles, in the Switch's much smaller form factor.
TL;DR: I think the foxconn leak had real hardware in it, but things changed because of Switch's success, Nintendo is no longer interested in releasing a console only version of the device and the handheld only version is likely just going to end up being a smaller hybrid for more portable version of the current switch but still won't see the light of day for 3+ years because Switch won't saturate the market enough to extend it's options beyond a performance hardware refresh by this time. Currently Switch is looking to be shipped up to 50M units before April 1st 2019, even if that extends the first 50 million Switch units til holiday 2019, this is when an iteration with more performance makes the most sense, coming out that September/October, would drive sales through the holiday and only the following year would they need more hardware versions to do the same, although I think 2020, we will likely see the successors to Mario and Zelda, which might end up being the peak year for the device, because those titles should have hype beyond any previous titles we've seen.
Ok, I'm done making predictions, it's probably important to note that I've been wrong about how optimistic I've been, so the above hardware predictions are really just the best you should hope for, you might want to drop those numbers some to find the most likely performance levels, but they should still be around 3x current switch hardware if they do push volta, which makes sense only because 16nm will remain expensive over 20nm, and 12nm should compete with 16nm as it isn't directly adopted by phone manufactures and is literally designed by TSMC for Nvidia, so much so that it's even named for Nvidia Volta, much like 20nm, but with the added benefit of 3D transistors.
