Damn, I called this a while ago. With Intel and AMD focusing on x86 and being behind on the competition, it makes so much sense that Nvidia would break into the processor space.
Also announcing this one day before the Qualcomm event is both funny and evil. Excited to see some good ARM laptops that aren’t Macbooks.
Yeah. I was actually really looking forward to the Shield X1 (or whatever it was) until it fell off the face of the earth for a few months and suddenly whatever the switch’s codename was had the exact same specs. Just a worse display, cheaper feeling plastic, and controller holders that break if you use them too much.
I tend to fall on the AMD side of things on PC, but I’m glad to see things getting shook up on the ARM side. I’d love to see AMD and NVIDIA go ham on RISC-V, but that’s a much bigger risk right now, and probably needs another 10 years of refinement to hit the efficiency of ARM.
I must admit, I never understood the use case for Shield. All I heard about was something about game streaming, as in running games from servers. Not a use case I personally found interesting. Google tried that too, and failed badly.
The switch however had the huge benefit of Nintendo IP, and was a natural extension of previous Nintendo systems.
However, I can clearly understand your disappointment if you hoped for a more versatile system.
For me it was more that I wanted an android tablet and that was pretty much the only good option. been a minute, but I want to say the Samsungs were still insanely expensive and the kindle fires were already a hot mess.
These days, Samsung actually have lower tier tablets that go on sale often enough that you can SORT of justify an android tablet. But it is still a god damned mess.
The shield is one of the best android boxes on the market, as one of its major features is upscaling videos using its notibly faster gpu compared to standard android boxes. With support for a wide amount of surround sound options, it is still virtually the best android streaming box for videos and games.
The shield tv was such a dominant amdroid box that nvidia fundamentally didnt change its soc simce 2015, outside of the die shrink from 20nm to 16nm that allowed for the upscale feature in the 2019 model and the better battery life in newer switches.
In 2015 it was also fast enough to do pretty decent big screen games rendered locally, too. I mean, like other person pointed out, its internals were powerful enough to have been (heavily) used for the Switch which hundreds of millions of people are still having fun with.
That was one of the reasons several people I know bought it.
Almost certainly. I’m glad they failed to buy it. It would have been a mess in the long run, but clearly they have plans for ARM.
Yes, but that chip is old. It was already a bit outdated when the switch came out, and that was 2017.
Correct, but they do work with ARM already. I’m guessing they will be making the chip for the Switch 2, which will probably be out of date when it comes out in 2024, but it will be a more modern chip.
The primary reason the company I work for is using a QC chip over any other ARM offering is the GPU they bought from ATI. The CPU cores aren’t particularly interesting
If AMD or nVidia release a SoC, it would likely be a strong contender for our next design
Not nearly as mature, but I’d be shocked if they’re not working on it. It doesn’t make sense to talk about it at this time, still lots of buzz around ARM.
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