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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

6x seems like a big difference; it makes me wish Ouya had waited a few months.

I don't see why Ouya's internals would necessarily remain static like the XBox 360. It can receive frequent spec bumps while retaining software compatibility. Owners of older hardware will play the same games, just at lower frame rates or graphics detail.

It's like Apple TV 2 vs Apple TV 3. You're hard pressed to notice the difference. Both are the same platform, but the newer one can display 1080p.

Oh yeah, I'm sure they don't intend to release one every 5 years, but every year. However, to me it would've made sense to release OUYA in 2013 with a 2013 chip, not a 2012 one. At the very least it would be on par with high-end phones and tablets from the same year.

But the price of the Tegra 4 isn't known. One of the most exciting aspects of Ouya is its price. You can get one for half of what a Nintendo Wii costs.

That's a sweet spot, people don't know the console but can consider giving it a try because of its price. Choosing Tegra 4 would probably increase the cost of the hardware.

Maybe in the future we will be able to buy a Ouya 2 (backwards compatible) with Tegra 4 at the same price, that would be wonderful.

I read somewhere that all the phone SoCs are under $30 (besides Apple, which is another discussion). I'm sure Tegra 4 would cost more than Tegra 3, but making the Ouya (let's say) 30% more expensive (for now) and 6x faster seems like the right tradeoff.

My thought exactly. The Tegra 3 is good tablet hardware, but it doesn't compete with serious consoles. With it, the Ouya is probably doomed to have little besides scaled-up phone/tablet games.

The Tegra 4 sounds like it might be a platform for hardcore games. Not with every last bit of the latest 3D glitz enabled, but good enough to run a version of most recent games.

Tegra 4 should also have OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL/CUDA support, so that's great for games, too. It's really a shame OUYA didn't wait for it. The Cortex A15 CPU's and higher bandwidth would've also helped greatly.

> 6x seems like a big difference

From the user's point of view, maybe not. If you do not do anything which requires much CPU power, then the difference may be between waiting 6 milliseconds and waiting 1 millisecond. I believe the parent's question was to know which kind of task requires the CPU power.

Parent is talking about the GPU performance; there are six times more graphics cores. The use case for OUYA, a games console, requiring more graphics power is surely obvious.

This is about GPU performance, though, and specifically regarding OUYA, I think that matters and will be visible in games.

Unlike other consoles, nothing is stopping ouya from adopting yearly or at least 18 month releases and I certainly hope they do.

Realistically,its probably already a challenge to ship the console with existing hardware, so it makes sense

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