The idea that Nvidia doesn't want to use the business with Nintendo to continue to create general customer Tegra chips just doesn't make much sense. This is from Q3 2017 earnings transcript:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang [B said:
"I guess you could also say that Nintendo contributed a fair amount to that growth. And over the next – as you know, the Nintendo architecture and the company tends to stick with an architecture for a very long time. And so we've worked with them now for almost two years. Several hundred engineering years have gone into the development of this incredible game console. I really believe when everybody sees it and enjoy it, they're going be amazed by it. It's really like nothing they've ever played with before. And of course, the brand, their franchise and their game content is incredible. And so I think this is a relationship that will likely last two decades and I'm super excited about it."
Nvidia makes a new Tegra chip "for" Nintendo, but puts it in their next generation Shield TV devices, sell it to vendors who want an ARM powered Windows device, and stuff like VR. Also, they aren't going to ignore
AMD coming into the mobile market, that is what the whole
Samsung fab contract win was about IMO.
Speak of the devil
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z0m3le
This is talking about the Tegra chips being made after Orin. This means that at least one new Tegra chip is coming next FY IMO.
The Jetson TX1 (Tegra X1 dev board) ends life in Jan 2021 as well.
Do we really need to talk about Switch 2 already?
Yes. Remember PS4 Pro, XB1X and New 3DS all launched by their 3rd or 4th year anniversary, and next FY ends right after Nintendo Switch's 4th year anniversary.
And just to put New 3DS into context, in 2013 they launched the $129 2DS, and the following year released the New 3DS/N3DSxl with about 6x the CPU performance. It also lead to about 3 dozen exclusives, such as Minecraft, Xenoblade port and fire emblem warriors.
Not quite, many others including Qualcomm have handhelf mobile GPUs that outpace Nvidia's. A very recent example would be the Adreno gpu in the new Surface tablet.
New software would have to be developed for them initially but its still an option on the table.
Nvidia hasn't left TSMC's 16nm process node (their 12nm is 16nm++), The Adreno 640 has a GFLOPs performance of 576GFLOPs iirc, hardly an improvement over Tegra X1, and inferior to Tegra X2. SQ1 is saying 2.1TFLOPs for the custom GPU, and while I believe that is FP32, it consumes up to 15watts just for the SoC (though it also consumes as little as 7 watts and has an 8 core 3GHz CPU). Nvidia is still the market leader here, and they will likely show it off next year with a new Tegra.
Nvidia GPU cores and their associated software (drivers, middleware etc) are the best in the business. Their weakness is the rest of SOC, especially the CPU.
There is no reason Nvidia or Nintendo couldn't opt into a new ARM CPU design.
ARM A76 in the chart below is using less than 5 watts of power draw.
and 2 new cores coming as early as next year are all hugely impressive.
yeah but, they already wanted in on all that and it didnt work out. it's nice to want things...
the chinese and korean companies are gonna use their own chips and qualcomm seems to have an absolute lock on everything else. part of it seems to be due to american cell frequencies, only qualcomm can seem to integrate them (this is why you dont see any exynos chips in american Samsung phones).
the idea of a high end, or almost any, american android phones releasing without qualcomm on board seems impossible.
Mobile chipsets are about a lot more than just Smart Phones though, Microsoft just last month showed off an ARM based Windows device, and intends to launch it next year, Nvidia has always wanted to release a windows SoC, but ARM wasn't compatible, that however is changing and Nvidia isn't going to miss out on it.
