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Comment by dejv | Hacker News Reader

Havent tried Xavier yet, but I am using TX2 in my work (which is previous generation of this type of device) and CPU is very weak to allow any serious gaming.

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Anecdotally, a friend has been using TX2s and got a Xavier to test out. He was blown away by the performance delta. It’s got an octocore ARM for a CPU, and while I don’t recall what the TX2 has... that’s a lot of CPU cores to work with.

I’ve got a Xavier sitting on my desk too, but haven’t played with it much. Running OpenCV on it and doing some light live video processing was really smooth.

For games you usually want smaller number of high performant cores than many lesser performant. Haven't done much game programming in recent years, but I still remmember the terror of programming PS3 Cell CPU.

Were the CPU cores of Cell (PPEs) hard to program? I had the impression that the difficulty of the Cell was in the need to manage the 8 SPEs, not in writing software for the Power4 core.

The 8 core Carmel CPU in Xavier is not like the SPEs in Cell.

It was hard to utilise all those cores. I am sure game architectures evolved during the years, but back then we didn't know how to split the code to optimally utilise all available resources.

Do you consider the Switch "serious gaming" or do you mean "serious graphics"? I don't know what "serious gaming" means and I doubt it means anything really, but in terms of raw performance: The TX2 default config will be somewhere around 4x more powerful than the (default downclocked) Tegra X1 in the Switch and everything from the CPU to the GPU is far more powerful at every metric, and it has better power consumption at basically every point on that curve.

"Weak CPU cores" does not mean anything, you have to couple it with a metric or comparison -- the Switch has a locked, 1Ghz quad core A57+A53, and it does just fine for a huge amount of games...

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