The idea that the codename is "no name" feels a little off to me
It's not supposed to mean "No name" it's supposed to mean "No texture" or "Plain", but others have other liberal interpretations of it like "Dream Magnet" and some ties to "Zen Buddhism" or Arabic origins.
If you want to compare Apple with Apples you need to compare the tegra with tablet SoCs which nowadays are called M1, M2, M3 or the upcoming Snapdragon X.
The tegra was significantly weaker than the pendant of its time A8X which was superior in architecture and was also 1 gen ahead in lithography.
Only in terms of the CPU, the GPU was competitive for several years. Tegra X1 rocked everything in mobile land for quite a long time with the capabilities of the GPU even if it was worse in the flops department, thing was just more efficient.
Not sure we just assume that Switch 2 will only use a miniscule amount of RAM for the OS. Depends on what their design goals are with it this time, they could easily use 3GB if they wanted to. Either way if that's the case, 9GB for games would still be incredible!
There's evidence to suggest it uses the same OS. It's forked, but there's some evidence of a nebulous device.
The original Switch only drew ~11w for the whole system while docked
That's only if it's fully charged, if it is missing charge the TDP goes above 15W for the whole system.
The Switch OS actually uses 800MB. I would expect 1.5-2GB for the Switch 2 OS - which still leaves plenty for games.
There's no need for that significant of an increase.
It's not like you need a significant amount of RAM to have all the features people want considering even the PSVita with a fraction of the RAM has these features people clamor to. Same for the 3DS.
The goal of their OS (Horizon) is to be fast and not get in the way.
The 800MB is with recording disabled, otherwise it's 911MB. So, almost 3.1GB for games. almost.
Compared to tablets and smartphones, the Switch has a cooling system and the OS is optimized for gaming as a single task. That gives it a substantial edge.
Since we're seeing games like RE4 and Death Stranding on iPhone 15 now, that's the absolute baseline of performance we should expect from the Switch 2.
For the record but that runs at like 360p lol, and uses Apple's METAL API.
If they had wanted something better, they could have asked for current PowerVR and ARM designs and an OEM who is able to put it into a single SoC
I'm looking at products with PowerVR and ARM at the time (around 2015/16 because they need to design the board and the console) and none of them are close to half of the Maxwell in performance even at 900MHz. The Tegra X1 at 900MHx would obliterate all of them back then.
this comment otherwise makes no sense as they did just that and that's what you're getting now. Nvidia already has the GPU, and the software stack to create an API, and the ARM license, and introduce major industry shifting technologies, which is what they wanted that eliminates having to spend so much on a larger than needed GPU. It was them or AMD again. They went Nvidia that time.
I think it's going to be a front and/or rear facing camera for AR games and integration.
I do also think there's something going on with the new buttons on the new Joy-Cons - it seems like the scroll wheel rumors may have been legitimate. Nintendo has a long history of wacky controller designs.
There's zero shipment data for a camera and for anything like a wheel.
And all the camera features that Orin has were removed for Drake. Though to that last part it doesn't seem too limiting of a factor.
In any case, we have the joycon 2, the pro controller 2, the console shell, the soc, the RAM, the storage, the other sensors like heat, the fan, the microphone. But no wheel and no camera. Either those are late, or they simply do not exist and people are willing it to exist.
How will that even work for games in docked mode.
I don't think it's true to call it pointless; AFAIK the Switch 1's internal storage was faster than cart/microSD and depending on the game noticeably so. Anecdotally I saw the biggest difference in UE4 third party titles like SMT5 and BD2. It's good to have some storage medium on the device with a high ceiling
They down clocked it, so it was operating at a fraction of the max speed of the EMMc for the most part, but with boosted loading I think it was raised a bit and with smart compression too to get the most out of it.
I think it was 30-50MB/s or so?
The problem with this is if they'd be using 4N then why not use Lovelace instead of porting Ampere to a process it was never made for? Honestly some other derivative of Samsung's 10nm is far more likely IMO. Samsung is also desperate enough for customers to provide solid price cuts to someone willing to become one for the next ~10 years.
It has some features from Lovelace for some reason, which is otherwise similar and much closer to Ampere than Pascal and Maxwell were.
Not really.....
It's not enough when total usage of ram, not just vram in a lot of games is just above it or well near 14GB.
So unless devs streamline the game for the platform they will have to make cuts immediately when I'm of the firmest opinion on a gpu like this why. Also each time they get near this limit they will be shanking their FPS, which I'm surprised someone else didn't factor in.
Fine is good if you like your post processing to be limited to medium or less and less of it.
This isn't hitting PS5 or even XBox Series X tier complexity, so the RAM is fine for it. If it was the same exact performance bracket as the other two, an argument can be made that 12GB is little and 16GB is more preferred but at that point It's not a portable and it doesn't use LPDDR it would use GDDR or DDR. Considering it's a much smaller GPU and thus will not be doing the same thing as a much larger GPU that demands resources a plenty, it can get away with it reasonably well. Plus, you didn't say it, but it's a silent thought: the series S should not be used as and indication for a different console imo, it should have had 12GB though.
Main issue with the Series S is amount of memory, then the bandwidth, in that order. It doesn't help that this is partly MS fault beyond just giving it less memory but because the system wasn't ready, it's why you see something like the PS5 outperforming the Series X even. The API isn't low enough, some features just consume more space on AMD hardware (like the BVH) for some features, etc etc.
It was a recipe for "it's not enough", and then I think the Zen cores need more space allocated to them form the main memory to work out ok compared to an ARM core, but that's just conjecture on my part.
We can easily use a title like FH5 which runs decently even on XSS, even at 1080p. This device wouldn't be able to push harder despite the fact it could cause it would the system limit of ram well before it would kill of bandwidth to have no fps.
I'm 99% certain that's because Microsoft wants it to not do what the Series X does, which is supposed to be the higher end system and completely defeats the purpose if the low end is doing what the high end does. Second, that's a cross gen Xbox One game, it's not next gen exclusive, the Series S was meant to replace the Xbox one just like the Seires X replaces the One X. Series S is limited, don't get me wrong, but some decisions have no technical limitation and have a business limitation. :p
They want you to buy the series X.
