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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia is famously a pain to work with. Apple vowed never to use their chips, Microsoft and Sony can't get them to make any GPU for their consoles.

The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.

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> The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.

And thats probably because Nintendo isn’t adding any pressure to neither TSMC nor Nvidia capacity wise; iirc Nintendo uses something like Maxwell or Pascal on really mature processes for Switch chips/socs.

And also the Switch 1 was just the hardware for a nvidia shield tablet from nVidia’s perspective, without the downside of managing the customer facing side and with the greater volume from Nintendo’s market reach. (Not that it wasn’t more than that for consumers or Nintendo, just talking nvidia here)

EVGA outright gave up on selling GPUs rather than continue working with NVidia.

> Apple vowed never to use their chips

I thought that was mainly due to bad thermals. I always got the impression that (like Intel) Nvidia only cared about performance, and damn the power consumption.

Nvidia sold defective GPU's that affected every 2007-2008 MacBook Pro. It was a manufacturing defect and every chip was guaranteed to fail. It was a bad look for Apple that cost them millions having to replace logic boards. The defect wasn't corrected for several years leading to some people having multiple logic board replacements.

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...

They, and everyone at the time, were kind of forced to switch to lead-free solder by RoHS. At that point, there probably hadn't yet been tests showing the results of constant thermal cycling, so the brittling effect was unknown. Apple was particularly affected as an early adopter because of their PR stance on environmental issues.

Refusing to acknowledge anything was wrong was the real problem. But that's just a reminder that companies don't care about you. Brand loyalty is a quagmire.

Nvidia refused to honour a gentleman's agreement that they were on the hook for recall issues with their GPUs. Steve Jobs didn't like that. One bit.

I think that works out tremendously well for Nintendo, especially when you look at the Wii-U vs the Switch.

I shot a video at CNET in probably 2011 which was a single touchscreen display (i think it was the APX 2500 prototype iirc?) and it has the precise dimensions to the switch 1.

Nintendo was reluctantly a hardware company... they're a game company who can make hardware, but they know they're best when they own the stack.

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