Nintendo Switch Specs: CPU and GPU Clock Speeds Reportedly Revealed

[goodtofufriday]

Source: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-switch-specs-cpu-and-gpu-clock-speeds-rep/1100-6446363/

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nintendo-switch-spec-analysis

 

Quote

According to the site, the CPU power is the same when the Switch is docked and undocked, with the cores running at 1020MHz in both situations. "This ensures that running game logic won't be compromised while gaming on the go: the game simulation itself will remain entirely consistent," the site reported. "The machine's embedded memory controller runs at 1600MHz while docked ... but the default power mode undocked sees this drop to 1331MHz. However, developers can opt to retain full memory bandwidth in their titles should they choose to do so."

The Switch's GPU speed is what might be controversial, Digital Foundry says. This is because, when docked, clock speeds for the system are reportedly locked at 768MHz. As the site points out, this is much lower than the 1 GHz that Nvidia's Shield Android TV runs at in terms of GPU speed.

"But the big surprise from our perspective was the extent to which Nintendo has down-clocked the GPU to hit its thermal and battery life targets," Digital Foundry said. "That's not a typo: it really is 307.2MHz--meaning that in portable mode, Switch runs at exactly 40 percent of the clockspeed of the fully docked device.

 

If that is true? Then I feel like portable mode will be extremely disappointing, and its likely down clocked to hit acceptable thermals... I have to say I'm very concerned right now. 

[AlwaysFSX]

Wow it's almost like mobile gaming has power constraints!

[Starelementpoke]

If it runs well, then yay. If it doesn't, then meh.

[tlink]

this device is going to be either extremely interesting or flop really hard, or possibly both. nintendo is trying to be really innovative and im really interested in how its going to turn out...

[Starelementpoke]

1 minute ago, tlink said:

this device is going to be either extremely interesting or flop really hard, or possibly both. nintendo is trying to be really innovative and im really interested in how its going to turn out...

If they manage to come up with a marketing campaign as good as the Wii's, it'll be great.

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, Starelementpoke said:

If it runs well, then yay. If it doesn't, then meh.

Anything can be run well at 480p 30fps /s

 

 

 

[Sniperfox47]

...If it's true, that's a really bad indicator...

 

If it's using the T210 chipset as recent reports have indicated, that puts it's undocked GPU performance at half of the Wii-U's, and its docked performance at pretty much the exact same...

 

And what's with the CPU clock? Is that for the Big cores or the Little cores? That would be literally a half of the clock of the Big A57 cores of the X1...

 

It's clearly not for thermal reasons since the Google Pixel C has an X1 and hits 1.9GHz on the four A57 cores, 1.3GHz on the four A53 cores, and 850MHz on the GPU... and runs fanless...

 

I'm left scratching my head if this is true... Just.... whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

[Zodiark1593]

51 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

...If it's true, that's a really bad indicator...

 

If it's using the T210 chipset as recent reports have indicated, that puts it's undocked GPU performance at half of the Wii-U's, and its docked performance at pretty much the exact same...

 

And what's with the CPU clock? Is that for the Big cores or the Little cores? That would be literally a half of the clock of the Big A57 cores of the X1...

 

It's clearly not for thermal reasons since the Google Pixel C has an X1 and hits 1.9GHz on the four A57 cores, 1.3GHz on the four A53 cores, and 850MHz on the GPU... and runs fanless...

 

I'm left scratching my head if this is true... Just.... whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

Isn't the Switch using a 20nm chip instead of a 14nm one?

[rattacko123]

well considering when docked it runs 1080p, 40% power for 720p (which is the screens native resolution) doesn't seem that bad actually.

[Sniperfox47]

6 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Isn't the Switch using a 20nm chip instead of a 14nm one?

The Maxwell based X1/T210 is 20nm.

 

Even the Pacal based Parker/T186 is 16nm, not 14nm.

 

These are the two most likely chipsets they could be using in the switch, but there is the increadibly small likelyhood they created something custom (just it seems weird we wouldn't have heard about leaks of a new Tegra chipset)

 

On the GPU side, T210 has 256 Maxwell CUDA cores clocked at up to 1000 MHz and the T186 has 256 Pascal based CUDA cores clocked at up to 1465 MHz.

 

On the CPU side T210 has 4 A57s at up to 1.9GHz and 4 A53s at up to 1.3GHz, configured configured in BIG.little. The T186 on the other hand has 2 Denver V2 cores and 4 A57s configured at unknown clocks in a Super.BIG configuration (the two Denver cores can scale power from all the way down being low power little cores to all the way up being ultra high power performance cores, so Nvidia refers to them as "super" cores).

 

Both use LPDDR4, although the T186 has a double wide bit width for higher bandwidth.

 

The T186 has an HSA implementation that includes the CPU and GPU, while the implementation on the T210 only includes the CPU cores.

 

TDP for both is 15 Watts.

 

The T210 is in at least 4 available products (Pixel C, Shield TV, Jetson TX1, and Drive CX/PX). The T186 is available in exactly 0 products currently but will be used in the Drive PX2 that was announced at the start of this year (Two T186 chipsets plus two additional dedicated GPUs).

[Notree]

Hey guys theres a thing called battery life. Try gaming on a phone. Any decent game will drain your battery to near nothing in quick time. It's Nintendo. They don't do cutting edge graphics.

 

EDIT: I understand everyone wants the fastest thing going. But Nintendo hasnt done that in years. They still sell millions of handhelds, yet are still using chips from 2006.

[Sniperfox47]

35 minutes ago, rattacko123 said:

well considering when docked it runs 1080p, 40% power for 720p (which is the screens native resolution) doesn't seem that bad actually.

Except that 720p is 45% the pixels of 1080p and you'd need even more compute than just 45% since a bunch of the initial geometry work is independent of resolution.

8 minutes ago, Notree said:

Hey guys theres a thing called battery life. Try gaming on a phone. Any decent game will drain your battery to near nothing in quick time. It's Nintendo. They don't do cutting edge graphics.

My Pixel C runs on a Tegra X1 clocked at twice this CPU speed, and over 2 times the GPU speed and I can easily get several hours of gameplay out of it... Tegras are very efficient processors, and tablets are on a completely different playing field from phones.

[rattacko123]

11 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Except that 720p is 45% the pixels of 1080p and you'd need even more compute than just 45% since a bunch of the initial geometry work is independent of resolution.

That is quite worrying. Maybe docked it runs 60fps while undocked is at 30fps? That would make more sense actually.

[sgloux3470]

Competent devs will target 60 FPS for docked and 30 FPS for portable mode, or a locked 30 for both with enough headroom to run the same in portable as docked.

 

It's no different than how most of Nintendo's titles on the Wii U ran at 60 FPS or at the minimum rock solid 30 FPS.  It's a matter of targeting the specs rather than pushing visuals at the expense of performance. (Which is what most PS4 devs seem to do.)

 

 

 

 

 

[Misanthrope]

Ok so let me piss off many of you by stating what many of us are thinking: The Wii was the flop, as in it was an unexplicable run-away success from a fucking out of touch company incapable of diagnosing what gamers want anymore.

 

The one exceptions being Japanese gamers and weeabos of course.

[Sniperfox47]

1 minute ago, rattacko123 said:

That is quite worrying. Maybe docked it runs 60fps while undocked is at 30fps? That would make more sense actually.

Or more likely it runs at 30fps in both cases and gracefully degrades the rendering in mobile mode, disabling some more performance heavy graphical features.

 

If this info is correct, I doubt it'll hit 60fps in console mode in any big games.

 

Consider that Breath of the Wild will likely run at 30fps on the Wii-U, and if this leak is correct the docked GPU performance of the switch will be near identical to the Wii-U flop for flop.

[Notree]

17 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

 

My Pixel C runs on a Tegra X1 clocked at twice this CPU speed, and over 2 times the GPU speed and I can easily get several hours of gameplay out of it... Tegras are very efficient processors, and tablets are on a completely different playing field from phones.

My point is cutting the gpu power will significantly increase battery life.  They're not aiming for the best graphics as usual. Id rather  play my games for 8 hours then have a little extra eye candy and only get 2 hours.

[Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, Notree said:

My point is cutting the gpu power will significantly increase battery life.  They're not aiming for the best graphics as usual. Id rather  play my games for 8 hours then have a little extra eye candy and only get 2 hours.

The problem is not users. It's developers. It doesn't matter if you want longer battery life. The console can only succeed if they somehow manage to get third party devs onboard. That's been the message ever since the NX was originally announced. "We are making a platform where it will be easy to bring third party titles to it and ensure a wide breadth of titles for users". If developers need to go out of their way to neuter their games to get it onto the switch, that won't happen.

 

If developers aren't making games for your system with 1/4 the power of it's competitors, switching to a system with 1/8th the power won't help encourage them.

[Misanthrope]

9 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

The problem is not users. It's developers.

Developers?

Spoiler

 

Sorry carry on now

[Notree]

10 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

The problem is not users. It's developers. It doesn't matter if you want longer battery life. The console can only succeed if they somehow manage to get third party devs onboard. That's been the message ever since the NX was originally announced. "We are making a platform where it will be easy to bring third party titles to it and ensure a wide breadth of titles for users". If developers need to go out of their way to neuter their games to get it onto the switch, that won't happen.

 

If developers aren't making games for your system with 1/4 the power of it's competitors, switching to a system with 1/8th the power won't help encourage them.

You have a good point. wiiu was definitely a flop in that way. No one wanted a new wii tho.  I honestly think 3rd partys will jump onboard since people have been waiting for a new Nintendo handheld. Time will tell.

[AlTech]

RIP Nintendo Switch. Dead on Arrival.

 

It's a shame. It really is...........

[Castdeath97]

53 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Ok so let me piss off many of you by stating what many of us are thinking: The Wii was the flop, as in it was an unexplicable run-away success from a fucking out of touch company incapable of diagnosing what gamers want anymore.

 

The one exceptions being Japanese gamers and weeabos of course.

Well then, explain why the Game Cube didn't succeed and what made the Wii beat it so easily? Like I always said the market is already saturated with PC like consoles, we don't need another PC imitator in the market.

[Castdeath97]

2 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Nintendo just being Nintendo

You realize they will NEVER have a system that can rival the power of the PC or PS/Xbox line.

They will never have games that look as good. In fact they will never settle on any one console design.

No, because if they try to compete in power they will lose. Even if they release a more powerful system, no one will care! IP has nothing to do with it, they already shown that they can come up with new good IPs like Splatoon.

 

The market is already saturated, it will be game cube all over again. 

[RagnarokDel]

6 hours ago, goodtofufriday said:

If that is true? Then I feel like portable mode will be extremely disappointing, and its likely down clocked to hit acceptable thermals... I have to say I'm very concerned right now. 

dude, it's a 720p (921 600px) screen. It's less then half a 1080p (2 073 600px) screen in terms of pixel.

[Master Disaster]

3 hours ago, Notree said:

My point is cutting the gpu power will significantly increase battery life.  They're not aiming for the best graphics as usual. Id rather  play my games for 8 hours then have a little extra eye candy and only get 2 hours.

My Shield TV running a full fat X1 connected to a permanent power supply can just barely run games from 2005 at 1080p. It plays HL2 at above 45 fps (but doesn't look anywhere near as good as it does on PC) while GTA SA cannot run at max detail 1080p without stuttering and hitching (and it still looks terrible compared to the PC version).

 

If the Switch is going to be less powerful than the Shield TV then its going to fail hard.