It's probably safe to assume it will be a customized version the latest or an upcoming model. I believe this puts the system in the PS4/Xbone ballpark.
That's OK, this time the console actually takes advantage of weaker performance to offer a better form-factor. Whether that tradeoff satisfies consumers is yet to be seen.
It looks like the power is somewhere between Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
The specs I saw showed it with 4 GBs of ram, which would put it clearly above Xbox 360/PS3 power and even a bit above the Wii U, which can do way better looking games than Xbox 360/PS3.
We shall see what the final specs and games look like, but what they showed off looked pretty good. It won't be PS4 Pro or Xbox One Scorpio powerful, but it's a device you can use on the go (or for second-screen gaming, which might be the killer app here).
When undocked, they can scale down resolution and frame rate for the smaller screen.
Doubt it. Not a trivial problem to solve technically and console pricing is inflexible - they need to sell this thing for under $400, and Nintendo hates subsidizing hardware.
Is it? We're not talking about load balancing GPUs - we're talking about a GPU just disappearing underneath you (like when the user picks up the Switch), while maintaining context and dynamically lowering quality - I can't imagine that being a trivial problem.
But that's not the major issue here. Nintendo is going to have to sell this thing for under $400. A mid-market smart-phone costs that much. Shipping a dock with a high performance GPU along with the actual portable isn't going to happen.
This all presupposes, though, that the hardware they're packing in the portable unit is comparable to what's in the PS4/XBO or their newer equivalents.
You say that like it's supposed to imply it's worse for some reason.
> battery-powered device with limited thermal regulation.
The Xbox one and PS4 were both released about three years ago. Almost three and a half by the time the Switch is released. That's a long time for Moore's law to operate, and it's easier for GPUs to take advantage of that phenomenon, since they are extremely parallel.
At 14-15 mm, the portable portion is actually a bit thicker (if smaller) than a new MacBook. Without the need for a keyboard or a clam shell design, that's probably quite a bit of usable space. I'm not sure why we should be surprised by claims of performance matching three year old systems.
It does because of thermals.
Isn't that entirely based on what they integrate? The market has traditionally been such that integrated units are for cost, and so are paired with cheaper GPU components. I don't know of any technical reason that integrated units use low end GPU specs, just business reasons. Any normal market pressures would be different in this case, based on the size of the order and specific needs.
> I'm assuming inferior refers to compute performance
Inferior based on maximum possible compute performance, sure. The top of the line dedicated GPU will have more leeway to work with than the top of the line integrated, but we're hardly talking about top of the line, we're talking about matching three year old hardware.
3 years is a long time but IMO not enough to being a 100+ watt SoC down to ~20-30 required for that form factor.
That being said, Nvidia is still much more energy efficient graphics wise vs AMD so I could see it getting fairly close - maybe 70-80%. CPU wise though I doubt they'll be as close just because of power.
Moore's law refers to the number of transistors, not speed. We've consistently added more transistors to CPUs, but through separate cores,since there are problems related to doing that usefully with a single core. Now, that's been of mixed benefit to some programs, because not all problems, programs, or programmers can effectively take advantage of multiple cores, or at least not effectively. GPUs though, are doing work that is "embarrassingly parallel", and thus can effectively utilize this increase in transistors and cores. For example, the GeForce Titan X has 3072 CUDA cores.[2]
The GeForce GTX 760 (maybe a mid-range desktop part?) was released June 25, 2013 with a retail price of $249.[3] The GeForce GTX 980M (second newest generation mobile part) was released October 7, 2014 (two years ago!).[3] It trounces the desktop part from one year prior.[4] We've had a year since then. I don't think there's any problem hitting the performance of the last generation of consoles, at least as far as the GPU is concerned.
Edit: Switched from 980 to 980M to clearly indicate a mobile part, which only makes the release a year earlier for the mobile part, but doesn't really change the outcome.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
2: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-tit...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...
4: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-980M-vs-GeForce-GTX-760
you cite nvidia as an example against it but nvidia itself clearly does is not of the same opinion
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/nvidia-vp-claims-tha...
http://www.techdesignforums.com/blog/2015/12/11/iedm-arm-yer...
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=13298...
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-un...
Poor reporting:
Moore's law describes that trend for computing performance – processing speed, memory capacity and the like - to double approximately every two years, named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who first outlined his theory back in 1965.
That's not what Moore's law is, and is an example of what I meant when I said it was incorrectly explained for decades. The very first paragraph of the Wikipedia article I originally cited shows this.
The other articles seem to be about density scaling, which is only part of what goes into "how many transistors you can fit into a dense integrated circuit." Cores, obviously, allow us to mitigate this to some degree.
For example, in this[1] article, you'll find a graph that shows transistor count over time. It's fairly easy to see that as of a couple years ago, Moore's law was still going strong.
1: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/190946-stop-obsessing-...
There is just no way they could pack the hardware/cooling/battery into a mobile device.
Xbox one GPU is 1.3 tflops and PS4 is 1.8 tflops. So in the same ballpark
2. Both Xbox and PS4 consume around 100W. Unless the Switch has 10x the perf/watt, it seems like performance won't be comparable.
3. Both Xbox and PS4 have massive heat sinks and fans, so they'll be able to sustain higher perf for longer.
Not clear on how they're cooling it, though
That's it? The PS4 is three years old now. They should be able to make something significantly better at this point.
Apple is claiming that the iPhone 7 has console-level graphics capabilities. If that's true (and I have no idea what that actually means), then Nintendo should be able to come up with something even better since they have so much more room for battery and have lots of expertise in making consoles.