Mobile consoles such as the DS, very close to being the best selling console of all time? 154 million to the PS2's 155 million. The Gameboy is number 3 at 118 million.
Sure, but the example give by the OP only listed a Switch game.
And the Switch represents them getting out of the hardware market entirely by converging their mobile and home console lines and going with an Nvidia designed machine for both.
Like, the Switch literally has the same RAM chips as the Tegra X1 dev boards. That's normally something that you'd swap out just based on your purchasing department's relationships with the chip vendors more than anything else and you almost never see those carried over.
Or maybe in 2020 the actual SoC is a piece of commodity hardware and claiming that the SoC + support components is the totality of hardware design is how you get constantly overheating iPhones that bend when you put them in your back pocket.
I can't find any public information on what the Tegra X reference design is without registering an account with Nvidia, but even if you're telling the truth you conveniently ignore that said ram chips are made by Samsung.
> Or maybe in 2020 the actual SoC is a piece of commodity hardware and claiming that the SoC + support components is the totality of hardware design is how you get constantly overheating iPhones that bend when you put them in your back pocket.
I mean, it's not a commodity. Another SoC means it's not a switch anymore as the software is incredibly tied to the specifics of that SoC.
> I can't find any public information on what the Tegra X reference design is without registering an account with Nvidia, but even if you're telling the truth you conveniently ignore that said ram chips are made by Samsung.
Here you can see the Samsung K4F6E304HB-MGCH chips being referenced for the Jetson Tegra X1 developer board.
> I mean, it's not a commodity. Another SoC means it's not a switch anymore as the software is incredibly tied to the specifics of that SoC.
It seems that most of the actual OS layer of the switch is designed to be hardware independent. I mean they managed to run Skyrim on ARM so it's not a stretch to say it wouldn't take much effort to move to a different SoC. Maybe using a different SoC would be difficult with Linux, but it doesn't seem the case with the OS they're using.
> eSOL, a leading developer of real-time embedded software solutions, today announced that its µITRON 4.0-compliant real-time operating system (RTOS) and exFAT file system have been adopted in the Nintendo Switch™ game console developed by Nintendo Co., Ltd
> Supported CPUs are numerous. ARM, MIPS, x86, FR-V and many others including CPUs supported by open source RTOS eCos and RTEMS, both of which include the support for µITRON compatible APIs.
> It seems that most of the actual OS layer of the switch is designed to be hardware independent. I mean they managed to run Skyrim on ARM so it's not a stretch to say it wouldn't take much effort to move to a different SoC. Maybe using a different SoC would be difficult with Linux, but it doesn't seem the case with the OS they're using.
There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that the games are tied specifically to this SoC. The closest you'd be able to get would be running the games in an emulator.
> uITRON stuff
Their OS really isn't uITRON derived, but I can believe they took the exFAT stack from there.
You can see the shape of the OS here, and it's pretty different from uITRON. https://switchbrew.org/wiki/SVC There might be a compat layer in the driver process for the exFAT driver though. They threw in a FreeBSD kernel space compat layer for their IP stack process for instance.
> This thread started because of a statement on "Asian companies"
That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the switch is Japanese hardware.
> There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that the games are tied specifically to this SoC.
You're missing the point. If they can port a third party x86 game using a notoriously janky decades old game engine to ARM then they can easily move to using a different SoC if need be.
> That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the switch is Japanese hardware.
You were being pedantic about what is and isn't hardware engineering. You can't just sell a bare PCB with a SoC on it.
The last mainline console they designed was the SNES, albeit they've been designing almost all of the mobile consoles.