QaaQer said: Just building on that:



Phones take a minimum of 18 months to go from design start to shelves, and phones are cut throat competitive with billions of r&d and the brightest minds. Consoles are looking at 24-36 months. So if launch is Dec 2016, look for, at best, late 2014 tech. Moreover, tape out needs to be 18 months out from shelves. The above is assuming custom hardware and OS etc.



Unless N is dropping Apple/Samsung money on these products, they will not be cutting edge or substantially more powerfulthan x1 ps4 at $399 or less.



I hope they prove me wrong. Maybe they are just going to slap off the latest off the shelf bits in there and massively subsidise the hardware. Click to expand...

N64's RCP wasn't pre-existing 1994 tech

Gamecube's Flipper wasn't pre-existing 1999 tech

XBox360's Xenos wasn't pre-existing 2003 tech

PS4/XBO's Jaguar wasn't pre-existing 2011 tech

(I've left out Cell, because that was obviously a different beast in terms of R&D spend than the above)Judging by comments in AMD's earnings calls, AMD started design work on NX at the end of 2014 (likely October or November). New designs like Polaris, Zen and K12 would have been well under way in AMD at that point, and AMD would definitely have been pushing this newer tech on Nintendo (as it would offset their own R&D spend on these projects). K12 is obviously out of the picture, as AMD have delayed it to 2017, and Zen seems unlikely to significantly outperform A72 on perf/W or perf/mm² metrics (although obviously it will provide substantially higher perf/thread, that's less important in a games console).Polaris is pretty much the only new AMD tech that Nintendo would consider for NX, but I think it's very unlikely for the home console purely as its dependent on 14nm manufacturing, and it would have been a big risk for Nintendo to commit to 14nm in late 2014 for a late 2016 launch. It's very difficult to predict yields that far in advance, and poor 14nm yields could lead to either substantially higher costs or a delayed launch.There is, however, the outside chance of Polaris in the handheld. If Nintendo are really serious about unifying development for their home console and handheld, then using the same GPU architecture (i.e. GCN) for both would be by far the best way of going about that. Attempting to squeeze a 28nm GCN-based SoC into a roughly 2W handheld thermal envelope would give you very little performance to work with on the handheld, but a Polaris chip on a 14nm process could give them the power they need to close the gap between handheld and home console (and the smaller the gap between handheld and home console the more they save in development costs over the life of the system). It's also less risky for them to commit the handheld to 14nm, as the small die would be less yield-dependent, and the continued sales of the 3DS would make a delay less of a blow. AMD would also be very happy to have a showcase for the power efficiency of their new Polaris architecture.Of course, my money would still very much be on a dedicated mobile GPU IP (i.e. Mali, PowerVR, etc.), but it's not completely impossible that Nintendo would surprise people with some new tech in the handheld.