Samsung and AMD may power Nintendo's Switch successor - RDNA's going mobile

[WYP]

Samsung's graphics partnership with AMD could bring RDNA to a Switch successor.



Read more about AMD and Samsung's graphics partnership.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Well the good thing is moving to RDNA or even 2 AMD already has small low power APUs so they probably already have much of the groundwork done for low power designs and it's just altering it to better fit ARM. Will still take years but definitely not as long as normal.

Seeing as AMD is really memory constrained it'll be interesting to see how they overcome this in a lower power format or if they even get to that point with such a weaker overall system.

 

[Stoly]

Actually, nvidia already has ARM SoC based on pascal and volta. No turing based AFAIK though, kind of makes sense as there's no use for RTX on a mobile chips... yet.

nvidia is still investing really big on AI and DriveEX, I do expect them to come out with ARM-Ampere

 

[WYP]

Actually, nvidia already has ARM SoC based on pascal and volta. No turing based AFAIK though, kind of makes sense as there's no use for RTX on a mobile chips... yet.

nvidia is still investing really big on AI and DriveEX, I do expect them to come out with ARM-Ampere

Yes, but none of those are consumer-facing. They are designed for autonomous vehicles. While they could be adapted, there would be a lot of wasted silicon there.

Nvidia has said before that they don't really care about consoles. Low margins. The Switch deal worked because they already had a part on the market.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Actually, nvidia already has ARM SoC based on pascal and volta. No turing based AFAIK though, kind of makes sense as there's no use for RTX on a mobile chips... yet.

nvidia is still investing really big on AI and DriveEX, I do expect them to come out with ARM-Ampere

While true they have ARM CPUs using Nvidia Graphics IP they haven't updated their mobile gaming architecture since 2015 with the Nintendo Switch. They only updated the Switch in the Tegra X1+ with minor clock speed increases due to the fact they went from 20nm to 16nm.

Everything else has been out of scope for a mobile platform.

I fully do not expect Ampere on mobile and nobody should either. Ampere will be a Volta Successor for HPC environments. If you see Ampere it won't be for a mobile platform as you said, for AI or whatever else they need.


If anything it sucks for Nintendo as it will most definitely cause backwards compatibly to be basically none.

 

[grec]

Personally I think NVidia would make an exception here, the Nvidia-Nintendo deal was around a decade in the making, originally they'd planned to collaborate with the 3DS but NVidia couldn't get the power envelope or costs low enough, NVidia has thrown a lot of money at trying to get Nintendo design wins over the years for whatever reason. As well as that, Nintendo I think have said repeatedly now that their plans are for the Switch to have a >10 year life cycle(A feat they managed with the GameBoy and DS lines) with upgrades, so that implies both new silicon, and backwards compatibility, which of course heavily implies they'd have to stick with NVidia but get a new part. (Also the Switch is a proven success at this point, and every Nintendo handheld line before has sort of had upgraded mid gen refreshes(GBC, DSi) and then spread into a semi separate 2nd gen(GBA, 3DS))

Though saying that, Nintendo has historically also been fond of providing backwards compatibility by just sticking the old chip in along side a new one, if that was economical.