this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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NVIDIA wasn't shy about this. They tried to buy ARM. They design the Tegra chip that is in the Switch.
And the Switch is basically just a rebranded (... with shittier plastic) Nvidia Shield X1 or whatever the number was.
Jensen et al have very openly been making inroads with ARM devices for the better part of a decade at this point.
I had a tablet once, with an nVidia Tegra SOC. Once they were the fastest Arm chips around.
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.
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.
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.
Just for market dominance I assume.
Yes, but that chip is old. It was already a bit outdated when the switch came out, and that was 2017.
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.
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.
Nvidia's ARM play has always been primarily in AI and vehicles. Tegra has a number of successors — just not in consumer devices.