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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

With first-party games coming to an end, the Wii U's underwhelming run is essentially over. The dynasty of related PowerPC processors starting from the GameCube has come to a close; other consoles switched off of much more custom and high-end PowerPC parts in Wii U's contemporaneous generation, with Xbox One ditching the custom Xenon and PS4 abandoning the Cell for AMD APUs that are closer to off-the-shelf than we've been in years.

With the Switch's Tegra and AMD's chips in the others, for the first time we'll be at a point where all mainstream game consoles will have CPUs designed by and sourced from companies whose primary business is GPUs, which I think is really interesting.

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>The dynasty of related PowerPC processors starting from the GameCube has come to a close

More-so than that, the dynasty of Nintendo home consoles is at a close too (though Nintendo PR managed to convince the public otherwise). Switch is a successor to their mobile consoles .

This will be the big showdown between Nintendo's internal worldview (and marketing), vs. the public perception.

Nintendo insists and markets the Switch as a home console, but there is a real danger that people will perceive it as a quasi-portable (as long as you're not too far away from the charger). This is further muddied by the 3DS line, a still-thriving mobile product which, despite having aging innards, has gone through a few facelifts and is still selling copies because its best-in-class library of coveted games.

It remains to be seen whether Nintendo will keep misunderstanding its market, or actually produce a hit this time.

Their exit was inevitable. Graphical performance is a huge aspect of home console and Nintendo is not capable of competing in that area - and their stellar first party lineup isn't enough to bridge that gap.

>It remains to be seen whether Nintendo will keep misunderstanding its market, or actually produce a hit this time.

I think the Switch will be a success and after the Wii-U fiasco, their marketing and branding is spot-on.

Nintendo is not capable of competing in that area

They can surely produce a capable console. After all, they partnered with NVIDIA. The question is whether it makes sense to go into this arms race, especially given that their traditional first party content is not well placed to make use of it.

By 'capable' I mean, they are too poor. Competing in this market means subsidizing the console and Nintendo cannot afford to do that in a way that Sony and Microsoft can.

>especially given that their traditional first party content is not well placed to make use of it.

That makes no sense. Why not? If they released their Wii-U games, unchanged, on the Xbox One or PS4 they would be mega-hits.

It plugs into the TV. It has traditional controllers available. It's a successor to both. That's just a fact.

And I commend Nintendo for convincing so many people of this 'fact'.

AMD's primary business is not GPUs.

Over 50% of their revenue comes from "Embedded and Semi-Custom", which is just about entirely PS4/Xbox sales [0]. Those products certainly contain a GPU occupying the majority of the die space.

[0]https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/232204-amd-reports-a-stro...

"Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom". Conveniently left off the first part there, of which is definitely not all GPU. And even if it was split like you want to imply it is, that would at best make it a minor majority, definitely not dominating revenue like it does with nVidia.

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