I recall reading this very same statement in a game mag during that time. It made a lot of sense considering how often the PSX would need to load in the map. Resident Evil 2 comes to mind, then MGS. MGS got away with the loading because it hid it behind the various FMVs.

>Hell the PSX has that terrible fixed point integer based calculation so it causes polygons "snapping into place" that causes the wobble effect so its not like they were the only ones making decisions that made the final product not as good as it could have been.

Yeah, then there was this. To be fair to Sony, I think they went cheap on the initial PSX as it was uncharted territory and I'm certain the finance gurus had pumped the brakes on being too lofty out the gate. Now the "wobbly" graphics are viewed as an aesthetic lol.

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.

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.