Switch "Pro" next year and Switch 2 in 2023. was always best guess, IMO nothing change with best guess.
Based on how tech has progressed since the Switch, how powerful could a Switch Pro in early 2021 actually be?
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Switch "Pro" next year and Switch 2 in 2023. was always best guess, IMO nothing change with best guess.
Tetsuya Nomura explicitly said that Square Enix has considered porting existing Kingdom Hearts games to the Nintendo Switch, but thought it would be too technologically difficult to do (even though Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix were originally PlayStation 3 games).
If Nintendo does decide to release the "Nintendo Switch 2" in 2021, I bet that Square Enix would potentially make Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, and Kingdom Hearts III "Nintendo Switch 2" exclusive games, which I'm sure current Nintendo Switch owners would not be happy about (in regards to Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix being potentially "Nintendo Switch 2" exclusive games), unless Square Enix repeats the same excuse for the "Nintendo Switch 2".
My point is that if third party developers are able to bring games to "Nintendo Switch 2", but not to Nintendo Switch due to technological reasons, I'm sure there's an incentive to develop "Nintendo Switch 2" exclusive games instead of developing games that work for the Nintendo Switch and "Nintendo Switch 2" (assuming Nintendo plans on releasing the "Nintendo Switch 2" in 2021).
And I guess that point also applies to the "Nintendo Switch Pro" if the technological leap is a successor type upgrade.
However, the leaks have been talking about a 4K Switch, that is more than just a little upgrade... I could see Nintendo using it to prolong their peak sales, 2021 is probably their peak, but 2022 could keep momentum going really well with this much more powerful console and Nintendo can introduce the Switch Lite version of this new model in 2023 on a new node, just like Lite was introduced in 2019... This also gives Samsung enough time to get their process nodes right for Nvidia to give Nintendo another 3 or 4 times performance increase for late 2024 or 2025, which could launch with a mainline Zelda.
Meanwhile next year's model is supposedly going to give us 4K, well in order to do that via DLSS, they have to bump the performance of the Switch by ~3 times, putting it on the same level as the PS4, but with DLSS.
Yeah, plus didn't they talk about a 7 year lifespan? I don't think Switch 2 is Spring 2023. Holiday 2023 or Spring 2024 is my guess.
Well it could be more like there is no next platform anytime soon. Remember Nvidia has a long contract with Nintendo, and that supports the idea that they are going to release Switch models with more performance over a very long time, over a decade it seems. I'd venture that the comment about the Switch being in the middle of it's life cycle is only the Gen 1 hardware, not the platform as a whole, giving us a 2024-2025 release for the upgrade after next year.
I'm not sure if Nvidia plans on fabricating a large amount of A100 GPUs, unless Nvidia plans to fabricate a fair amount of A100 GPUs alongside the Orin SoCs if it's true that the Orin SoCs are fabricated at 7 nm (I'm assuming it's TSMC's 7 nm nodes since I didn't hear any news of Nvidia prebooking capacity at Samsung's 7 nm nodes).
If you're talking about Samsung's 7 nm or 5 nm nodes, I don't know if that would be the case, given the news about TSMC being so far ahead of Samsung that Samsung cannot catch up to TSMC until 2030 at the earliest, even if Samsung can offer up extremely aggressive discounts on its fabs.
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These GPUs are huge (i.e. they need a lot of wafers to make them) and their DC/AI business is growing at insane speed so yeah, we can assume that they plan on fabricating quite a number of A100s.
The point is that they obviously have the capacity. How they'll use it for their product mix can be quite flexible and change from period to period.
That's the lifespan of the Switch, not necessarily when its successor will launch. There's quite a lot of evidence that Nintendo is going to want to keep the Switch going after the Switch 2 is on the market. At this point, I definitely wouldn't be surprised by a scenario where next year's Switch is actually "Switch 2", but the Switch will still keep receiving games until the "Switch 3" launches in 2024-2025.
So the Seagate expansion card for the Xbox Series S/X apparently seems to be a PCIe 4 CFExpress card. So I guess CFExpress cards could potentially be viable for a console released at around 2024?
Great. It's NVMe! It's just using the CFExpress interface instead of the M.2.
EDIT: I wonder if it's type B or C. http://www.divephotoguide.com/under...2-0-cards-three-sizes-various-maximum-speeds/
Type C looks massive compared to an SD Card.
Nevermind that one, was referencing a picture that didn't really give me a clear view.
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I'm guessing it's type C, given how big it looks, and that the dimensions of type B are similar to the dimensions of a regular SD card.
Given the actual bandwidth requirements, I'd think type C. 4 lanes is better than 2!I'm guessing it's type C, given how big it looks, and that the dimensions of type B are similar to the dimensions of a regular SD card.
This has gotten me all excited about the possibilities. It's a whole chicken and egg problem for this. This will give samsung an easy path to manufacturing ordinary CFExpress Type C cards, and will make it easier for them to make deals with other companies to manufacture them as a more user friendly alternative to M.2.
M.2 has the same user friendliness problem that USB-C has. It's too flexible, and you need to know what you're doing to make sure what you're buying is the right thing for the job.
Eh, If a Switch successor used proprietary media for expansion there's other options they could base it on that will be smaller than CF.
Edit: Type C is 9cm diagonal! Are you sure that's what he's holding?
Edit: Type C is 9cm diagonal! Are you sure that's what he's holding?
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Well a card that small may not necessarily need to be an external proprietary storage solution. What if they took something like that removed it from the exclosure and it was soldered directly to the mainboard as primary storage instead.
Considering the Switch has 32GB internal and used Micro SD for external. Having an internal based on a card that small at 1TB wouldn't be too bad and considering the pricing for the technology goes down over time by the time the Switch 2 comes out having sub $400 hybrid handheld console with 1TB of internal storage isn't bad at all.
I mean even the highest end Samsung Galaxy S10+ has 1TB of internal storage and packs 12GB of Ram.
If they can fit it into a phone, then fitting it into a larger handheld device shouldn't be an issue. It's just a matter of cost and being able to produce a product that is viable to sell at the targeted price point Nintendo wants to target.
Considering the Switch has 32GB internal and used Micro SD for external. Having an internal based on a card that small at 1TB wouldn't be too bad and considering the pricing for the technology goes down over time by the time the Switch 2 comes out having sub $400 hybrid handheld console with 1TB of internal storage isn't bad at all.
I mean even the highest end Samsung Galaxy S10+ has 1TB of internal storage and packs 12GB of Ram.
If they can fit it into a phone, then fitting it into a larger handheld device shouldn't be an issue. It's just a matter of cost and being able to produce a product that is viable to sell at the targeted price point Nintendo wants to target.
These sorts of memory cards are typically used in cameras and stuff, so I don't think using it in a device with a battery should be a problem.
Where did you get the information that CFExpress Type C is around 9 cm diagonally? The link bmfrosty shared says that the dimensions of the CFExpress Type C card (when placed horizontally I presume) is around 54 mm x 74 mm x 4.8 mm, which is around 5.4 cm x 7.4 cm x 0.48 cm.
Just to make sure everyone understands me, I was wondering if using CFExpress cards for external storage would be viable for a console released in 2024. But anyway, I was also talking about the viability of using CFExpress cards when price is concerned since Nintendo's price sensitive and CFExpress cards are currently expensive. But since the Seagate expansion card for the Xbox Series S/X apparently seems to be using PCIe 4 NVMe, but using the CFExpress interface instead of the M.2 interface, hopefully CFExpress cards would decrease in price fairly quickly.
Pythagoras I guess. 91.6mm, then there would be a few more mm for the protective casing they've put around it if it's the standard card design. Anyway, Xbox internal ssd is rated as 2GB/s so it makes sense for external to be the same as the B option.
He's right about the 9cm, a^2 + b^2 = c^2. I just looked at my ruler vs my thumb joints, and 54mm looks bigger than what he's holding.
Actually, the internal NVMe storage in the Xbox Series S/X is around 2.4 GB/s raw and 4.8 GB/s compressed (though I don't know if being rated for around 2 GB/s refers to only raw speeds). And here's the official spec sheet with the dimensions for the Seagate expansion card.
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Yeah I had it in my mind it was 2GB, my bad. I guess it's a custom design that doesn't quite match those cards then, I might check the Series X pictures later, he might just have huge hands.
Someone will have disassembled one by the end of November.
As far as the speed, that sounds right if it's 2 lanes instead of 4 based on some very cursory research.
I fixed the link for the official Seagate expansion card spec sheet. But it definitely looks smaller than I expected.
The internal storage speed isn't really the problem for a device like the Switch. The current internal storage isn't super fast, but it doesn't need to be because the entire system is tuned around running at roughly the speed of a UHS-I SD card. There are faster options that exist that Nintendo could use if it made sense for them. The problem is, if they want to increase the speeds in a successor, then they need a faster external storage medium to match that, and, even though there are like 3 or 4 different higher speed SD card specs at this point, adoption of them has been very slow (when it's even happening at all). So, unless there's some actual movement on the SD card front, they'll need to find some sort of faster external storage to use (with CFexpress seemingly being one of the top contenders right now).
I'm kind of confused by this, why would you need 3x power increase to have a game like Mario Odyssey run at 4K via DLSS?
Isn't the whole point of DLSS that you don't need to have such a large power increase to get that kind of resolution bump?
Like you would need the game to run 1080p native and the there is some overhead for DLSS to get that to 4K, but that shouldn't require a 3x hardware increase.
The alternative is they rely on internal instillation for the critical data of games you're currently playing, and just leave micro sd and game card speed for the slow stuff. I think that might end up being the simplest way forward, when 128GB will be the absolute minimum for ultra high speed internal storage.
SD Card forum is slow to give away the faster cards because they want the high end video market to pay a heavy premium for those cards for a few years. They know a normal person doesn't need a SD Card that fast so they have to make their money for those cards from the prosumer/professional video market.
I wonder if Nintendo were were to cut a deal with a supplier for technology that's similar to that or the SD Card forum itself, but agree to lock out the cards from compatibility with video cameras, that they couldn't maybe get a much, much better price.
And even though people didn't like Vita proprietary cards, Nintendo would have a fair argument here based on performance. And also it probably would be a very nice chunk of change for Nintendo to be getting the SD Card money that people buy for their Switch instead of not getting anything from that.
I wonder if Nintendo were were to cut a deal with a supplier for technology that's similar to that or the SD Card forum itself, but agree to lock out the cards from compatibility with video cameras, that they couldn't maybe get a much, much better price.
And even though people didn't like Vita proprietary cards, Nintendo would have a fair argument here based on performance. And also it probably would be a very nice chunk of change for Nintendo to be getting the SD Card money that people buy for their Switch instead of not getting anything from that.
I'm not talking about internal flash storage, considering that UFS 3.1 has up to 2.1 GB/s in sequential read speeds and up to 1.2 GB/s in sequential write speeds. And UFS 4.0 looks like it has up to 4.8 GB/s in performance. And almost all Android mobile smartphones nowadays are using UFS for internal flash storage, making the size and the price a non-issue.
I'm primarily talking about external storage. But like Pokemaniac mentioned, the problem when it comes to external storage is that really fast SD specifications, like SD Express 8.0 (with up to 4 GB/s in performance), are very unlikely to be adopted anytime soon, considering that the fastest SD/microSD cards on the market are UHS-II cards (with up to 312 MB/s in performance). And CFExpress cards are currently expensive, although I hope it might drop down significantly in price fairly quickly, considering that the Seagate expansion card for the Xbox Series S/X apparently seems to be using PCIe 4 NVMe, but using the CFExpress interface instead of the M.2 interface.
Having to wait for a game to install just because it hasn't been played in a while doesn't sound like a good user experience. Also generally kind of seems like an option that Nintendo only reaches for as an absolute last resort, going by their history.
Right. It seems prone to problems, unless it was dealt with as purely an SSD cache.
I think it's super interesting that Microsoft has basically created the market for CFExpress Type B cards. It makes it a lot easier for Nintendo to maybe do the same.
I wonder if Orin has PCIe lanes. If it does, then we might be seeing an on-board NVMe SSD as the main storage, with a CFExpress Type B slot for expanded storage. Even CFExpress Type A would probably be sufficient, especially if it were PCIe 4.0.
Whatever they do the price target really shouldn't be more that $0.22/GB.
I wonder if camera enthusiasts will schuck the XBOX ones to use in their cameras if they're 1/2 to 1/3 the price of the ones made for cameras.
Well 0.22 x 1024 (1TB) is basically $225 which is basically what the proprietary SSD drive for the Xbox Series S|X costs.
And is around the price point for the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB as well. So think by the time the Nintendo Switch 2 comes out they can probably get even more space for around the same price point.
It's gonna be interesting to see someone tear down one of these Xbox proprietary storage cards is nothing more than a fancy enclosure with a 2242 SSD inside.
Right. That's why I picked that price.
And yeah, they could be a fancy enclosure for a 2242. It's NVMe. Unless my understanding is totally wrong, CFExpress is an enclosure for hot swappable PCIe Lanes that specifically have a NVMe SSD.
M.2 is many things, but the two most popular are
B Key) PCIe ×2, SATA, USB 2.0 and 3.0, audio, UIM, HSIC, SSIC, I2C and SMBus
M Key) PCIe ×4, SATA and SMBus
It's almost incidental the NVMe became most popular on it. Early implementations of NVMe were still using the 2.5-inch SSD form factor and used a connector called U.2.
Chances are that it won't be a M.2 Board, but that you would be able to find the same interface controller on an NVMe SSD.
Well oddly enough I couldn't find any PCIe 4 2242 drives out on the market yet. So it might be something custom Seagate whipped up for Microsoft. What I was eluding though is someone tearing the enclosure apart and swapping it with a larger capacity drive. Although I'd guess that these Proprietary drives are pre-formatted in advance or have some kind of encryption or lock themselves to the Console ID or Firmware until they are plugged into a different Xbox Series S or X and needed to be formatted to work on that different console.
I mean It would be nice if 1TB isn't just the limit here especially when something like this exists - https://www.newegg.com/sabrent-rocket-2242-2tb/p/0D9-001Y-00020 shame about it being PCIe 3 though.
I digress though this isn't Nintendo Switch 2 related so I'll try to stay on topic from this point on.
Strange. I had thought that those exact Sabrent Rocket drives were PCIe 4.0, but a closer look says otherwise. $0.14-$0.16 a gig is nice though. If I were in a PC gaming phase, I'd probably be building around something like that.
EDIT: I thought that the price differential between the Series X SSD and this may have been down to PCIe 3 vs 4, but really it's just at the high end of the price band for those, but only has half the PCIe lanes.
I'm coming back around to my earlier statement that assuming that Nintendo is going to go with NVMe for both main and supplementary storage, that M.2 2242 is probably the way for them to go, and that they should probably partner with someone like Sabrent for branded drives in an enclosure that's not much more than an aluminium heat shield with a Nintendo logo of some sort. Start at 256GB for like $50. Make it open enough that any 2242 could fit in there, but have it test that it meets a minimum standard like PCIe 3.1 and some benchmark to make sure it's fast enough.
EDIT: I thought that the price differential between the Series X SSD and this may have been down to PCIe 3 vs 4, but really it's just at the high end of the price band for those, but only has half the PCIe lanes.
I'm coming back around to my earlier statement that assuming that Nintendo is going to go with NVMe for both main and supplementary storage, that M.2 2242 is probably the way for them to go, and that they should probably partner with someone like Sabrent for branded drives in an enclosure that's not much more than an aluminium heat shield with a Nintendo logo of some sort. Start at 256GB for like $50. Make it open enough that any 2242 could fit in there, but have it test that it meets a minimum standard like PCIe 3.1 and some benchmark to make sure it's fast enough.
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The cost of DLSS is consistent, it requires an exact amount of time to run the algorithm and produce the 4K image, it doesn't seem to change with different inputs, and 4K on Turing took about ~18ms for 1tflop of performance. (we aren't actually using tflops to measure the performance, I'm using it as an expression of Turing SM performance, because there is 8 Tensors cores per SM and they are clocked the same as Cuda cores, which is why you can use tflops as an expression of the performance).
It took 7TFLOPs from the RTX 2060 Super to reach 2.55ms cost for 4K DLSS overhead. Ampere tensor cores are over twice as performant than Turing, so 8SM (configured like Turing but with new Ampere cores, 512 Cuda cores, 64 Tensor cores) @ 1.3GHz gives you 1.3TFLOPs which are over twice as performant. This gpu should be able to take a little over 6ms to reconstruct the rendered image into 4K via DLSS, frame time for 60fps is 16ms and 33ms for 30fps, so Nintendo can offer 4K@30fps with the GPU I'm talking about, but it would be rough to render in 10ms for 60fps, however you can render in 720p with DLSS 2.1 to reach 4K.
The long and short of it is that the render is where you save time at the cost of however long it takes you to do the DLSS reconstruction, that output cost is fixed by the output resolution, so it means a minimum performance level of the GPU is required to hit 4K, it's not the maximum performance Nintendo could go with.
GTC Online. There's going to be a keynote at 6am (PDT). Maybe we might hear more details about Nano Next.
So here's a picture of what the Seagate expansion card for Xbox Series S/X looks like next to a regular SD card.
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I could see a 4 year cycle, OG Switch will be supported together with Switch '21 until its successor arrives in 2025, Switch '21 will be supported until '29 and so on.
That is the best move they could make I think. We could see 3rd parties support it with exclusives, Nintendo could start some first party exclusives whenever they release the next Lite model with this new SoC, probably in 2023, just a few years into next generation.
Guys how is Nintendo going to fit that into a handheld?
Never doubt
If I'm not wrong, an 8SM ampere GPU would have 1024 cuda cores, 64 tensor cores @1.3GHz 2.6FP32 TFLOPs. The transistor budget would be the same as Xavier's Volta GPU ~ 56mm2 on 8 nm.
An 4SM ampere GPU would have 512 cuda cores, 32 tensor cores (doubling the necessary time for DLSS) @1.3GHz 1.3FP32 TFLOPs. The transistor budget would be closer to half the Xavier's Volta GPU ~ 28 mm2 on 8 nm.
Considering that the RTX 3090 routinely consumes over 375 W of power and has a peak power draw of over 450 W, making a high quality 850 W power supply obsolete since it couldn't supply enough power, I'm not sure Nvidia wants to continue using Samsung's fabrication nodes, even if Samsung gives Nvidia an aggressive discount on prebooking capacity on Samsung's fabrication nodes. I'm talking about for a console releasing at around 2023-2024.
(10:56 - 11:17)
So Ming Chi-Kuo predicted that the new iPad Pro would be the first Apple device to feature a Mini-LED display. So I wonder if and when the price of Mini-LED displays would decrease to the point where Nintendo might research into the viability of using one for a console releasing in 2023-2024, going by a recent LinkedIn job listing posted by Nintendo Technology Development in Redmond, Washington. And I'm not going to lie, I'm on board with a console releasing in 2023-2024 having a Mini-LED display since Mini-LED don't suffer from burn-in like OLED does. But I don't know if Mini-LED displays would have a significant price drop by then.
(10:56 - 11:17)
So Ming Chi-Kuo predicted that the new iPad Pro would be the first Apple device to feature a Mini-LED display. So I wonder if and when the price of Mini-LED displays would decrease to the point where Nintendo might research into the viability of using one for a console releasing in 2023-2024, going by a recent LinkedIn job listing posted by Nintendo Technology Development in Redmond, Washington. And I'm not going to lie, I'm on board with a console releasing in 2023-2024 having a Mini-LED display since Mini-LED don't suffer from burn-in like OLED does. But I don't know if Mini-LED displays would have a significant price drop by then.
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I mentioned configuring the SM like Turing, so 512 Cuda cores, 64 Tensor cores and 8 RT cores possibly.
It's important to note that when people talk about Gflops or Tflops, they're talking about them as a proxy for real-world performance (or at least they should be). The actual performance of a GPU (ie the speed at which it renders a given frame) is going to be limited by a number of potential bottlenecks, including floating point performance, integer performance, memory bandwidth, TMU performance, ROP performance, register memory, cache, etc., etc. Even within the rendering of a given frame, those bottlenecks could change, so for example one millisecond it could be integer-limited, the next it could be ROP limited. As such, the actual render time for a frame is going to be dependent on a number of different bottlenecks impacting different parts of the rendering pipeline.
So when I compare, say a 1Tflop Turing GPU to a 2Tflop Turing GPU, I'm really comparing the first GPU to one where every bottleneck is doubled, because alongside those extra FP ALUs in the added SMs, there's twice the ROP performance, twice the TMU performance, etc. (Bandwidth isn't strictly linked to the number of SMs and clock like this, but you would expect any GPU designer would avoid a bandwidth-limited design if at all possible.) So the second GPU isn't twice as powerful as the first because it's capable of 2Tflops, it's twice as powerful because a whole range of bottlenecks have been doubled, just one of which is the floating point performance. We just use the floating point performance as a proxy because it's a relatively simple and straight-forward measure. It's also generally a very big number (in the trillions these days), so it's a useful advertising tool for GPU makers.
The issue with using flops as a measure of relative performance is that it only really makes sense when comparing two GPUs on the same architecture. If you compare a 1Tflop Maxwell GPU to a 1Tflop Turing GPU, they're not going to have the same level of performance, because the new architecture includes changes to many of those other bottlenecks which haven't scaled linearly alongside the floating point performance. We would only expect the two GPUs to have the same performance in a game which is entirely floating-point bottlenecked 100% of the time, which is never the case in the real world.
What makes this even less useful for Ampere is the way they changed the shader ALUs in the Ampere SMs over Turing. In a Turing SM there was one bank of floating point ALUs ("cores") and one bank of integer ALUs which could operate simultaneously. The integer ALUs weren't being very heavily utilised, so Nvidia changed the bank of integer ALUs to one which could either operate on integers or floating point numbers. So, assuming no integer workloads, an Ampere SM could operate at double the theoretical floating-point performance of a Turing SM. However, this was a relatively isolated change, and Nvidia didn't double everything else in the Ampere architecture alongside this. What this means is that you can't make any meaningful comparisons of floating point performance between Turing and Ampere. In fact, it's likely that Ampere will basically never be floating-point limited, which means using Tflops as a measure of an Ampere GPU's performance at all is rather pointless.
This is why I'm talking about SMs and clock speeds rather than "cores" and Gflops/Tflops when I talk about any potential Ampere-powered future Nintendo device. An Ampere GPU with a given number of SMs at a given clock should outperform a Turing GPU with a similar configuration, but the comparison gives you a much better idea of the real-world performance than comparing theoretical Tflop counts. When I suggested a 6 SM Ampere GPU at 1.3GHz in docked mode would be needed to facilitate DLSS at 4K/60, if I had said a 2Tflop Ampere GPU it would have given a very unrealistic expectation of performance compared to any existing non-Ampere GPU. In reality it's a GPU that's 50% "bigger" than the one in the original Switch, running on a newer architecture and at a higher clockspeed. Certainly a decent jump in performance over the original model, but nothing as crazy as 2 Tflops would imply if that were the only thing you were looking at.
I don't think the Xbox expansion cards are literally CFExpress Type B cards. They may use the same interface (which is basically just NVMe over PCIe), but the physical size seems different, the pin layout could be different, etc. In theory you may be able to make an adaptor, but keep in mind that the cameras currently supporting CFExpress Type B are professional cameras for the most part, and if a card isn't 100% guaranteed to work with your camera, it's basically useless to a professional. A day of work lost because of a card failure is worth a lot more than the difference in price between this and a "real" CFExpress card, which is one of the reasons CFExpress cards are still so expensive, they're genuinely worth that much to a professional.
What I think this does indicate, though, is the huge differences in price for memory cards aimed at a small professional market vs those aimed at a mass market consumer audience. The Xbox card made by Seagate is basically exactly the same thing as a CFExpress Type B (actually faster than the ones currently on the market), but is priced far lower because they're expecting to sell to a very large group of people who are very price-conscious. The irritating thing for photographers (and Xbox owners, to be honest), is that they didn't just put an actual CFExpress Type B slot on there and partner with Seagate to bring out a branded 1TB CFExpress card at launch for an aggressive price point (ie exactly the he same thing in a different case). This would have given photographers a much better-priced option for their cameras, but in the long term would have resulted in competition for the Xbox end of the market by Sandisk, Samsung, etc. who could have undercut the official card on price and/or offered different capacities, etc.
That's basically what I'd like to see happen with the Switch 2 and CFExpress Type A. The PCIe 4 version will allow speeds up to 1.7GB/s, in a form-factor smaller than standard SD cards (actually about the same size and shape as Switch game cards, as it happens). There may be a variety of mid and high-end cameras out there with CFExpress Type A by that time, where cards would still be relatively expensive with a smaller, less price-conscious audience, but Nintendo themselves would be big enough to force a lot more competition into the market just by releasing a device which supports the card format. They could partner with Samsung or Sandisk or whoever and make sure there's a range of competitively priced (and Nintendo branded) cards out by launch, and then rely on competition to keep prices and capacities going in the right direction over the life of the device.
Power consumption is a choice on Nv side, not something inherent to Samsung process. It wouldn't be a lot lower if they'd used N7 instead.
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