[HN Gopher] Cortex A57, Nintendo Switch's CPU
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Cortex A57, Nintendo Switch's CPU
Author : rbanffy
Score : 165 points
Date : 2023-12-13 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chipsandcheese.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chipsandcheese.com)
| tiahura wrote:
| As my 6 year old makes his way through Fortnite Season 5, I'm
| impressed that his Switch still handles his no-scope sniper
| odyssey on these 8 year old Tegra X1s.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It's impressive, but it's also somewhat amazing to consider
| that the Tegra X1 is still about 3.5-4x as powerful as the GPU
| in the Raspberry Pi 5 - even if any iPhone chip since the A11
| Bionic would beat the X1.
| MBCook wrote:
| We'll never see it, but I've wondered what a Switch would
| look like with an Apple chip.
|
| Take something relatively modern but no longer too expensive,
| say an A15 like the Apple TV has, bump the screen to 1080p,
| and I bet it would scream. Possibly with better battery life.
|
| Nintendo would never do that. I doubt Apple would either. But
| it would be a very interesting test.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I've been playing Skyrim and Portal 2 on the Switch Lite and it
| keeps amazing me that games that my PS3 struggled with are now
| perfectly playable on a handheld device that has pretty good
| battery life and doesn't burn my hand. A device like this would
| have blown my mind 10 or 15 years ago (even more than the
| original PSP did the first time I saw one).
| fishtacos wrote:
| The PSP was amazing. The PS Vita - on a whole 'nother level,
| both performance-wise and controller improvement. It wasn't
| until the Switch came around in 2017 (purchased in 2018) that
| we realized HD (720p) gaming on a handheld machine. The fact
| that so many AAA games have been ported down to it is a
| testimony to its capabilities. Not a fan of nVIDIA in
| general, but they did an amazing job with this unit. If one
| wants real PC gameplay without porting down, the Steam Deck
| starts at $400, add a MicroSD card for more storage.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| What really blows me away is stuff like the z1 extreme and
| a laptop I have that is two generations behind that but has
| a 130w power envelope pushing 60-100fps AAA titles at 1440p
| - runs super hot but in a few years we may have handhelds
| doing something similar which I'm super excited for.
| fishtacos wrote:
| There is nothing that can be encompassed by a 220-300+
| power envelope into a handheld for the next several
| years. Still, downgrading visual FX is one doable. Steam
| Deck 2 and Switch 2 are in the horizon. AMD v. Intel, as
| far as I'm concerned.
| zeusk wrote:
| Wait till you see what Apple's Vision group has in store.
| graphe wrote:
| The vita sucked with no homebrew and the switch is another
| psp. You could run games off the pro duo or a microsd
| adapter but vita was locked down, slow and a bunch of lame
| remakes and psp titles. The PSP emulated up to the PS1.
|
| By the time the switch was around people had been emulating
| on Android for a long time. They can do better graphics but
| there hasn't been a game that made me feel like I needed 4K
| on handheld. The switch really is another golden age for
| gaming with the switch being hacked so quickly and having
| such good homebrew.
| fishtacos wrote:
| The PS Vita predated the Switch by 6+ years... by the
| time emulation and CPU speed to match its requirements,
| it was already discontinued by Sony. It fulfilled its
| purpose.
| graphe wrote:
| The vita was a direct downgrade from a PSP if you valued
| fast loading times, emulation, homebrew and piracy. Even
| if you didn't pirate you gained the ability to rebuy your
| PSP games, and new expensive games with an OLED that had
| less battery life.
| fishtacos wrote:
| A downgrade from UMDs? Perhaps you're referring to the
| density of textures and newer, more demanding game
| engines, because the UMDs were such a pain. Trying hard
| not to get hyperbolic here.
| danhor wrote:
| At least regarding the homebrew, I disagree completely.
| While it took a while for the vita to be thoroughly
| hacked, it has been thoroughly hacked. And the benefits
| are numerous: Using normal SD cards, expanding the the
| integrated psp hardware into a virtual psp, reformatting
| of the internal storage, extending it by replacing the 3G
| modem.
|
| Meanwhile the switch had the big bootrom usb stack
| exploit, but everything apart from the original SoC
| doesn't have a publicly known easy exploit (there are mod
| chips, but nothing like the 3DS/PS3/Wii U/Vita/PSP/...).
| There also wasn't that as much "cool" stuff to do as on
| older consoles with homebrew due to the hardware simply
| being an android tablet with controllers (which doesn't
| make a difference as a console, but makes it more boring
| homebrew wise). So there is the usual stuff (savegames,
| different controllers, piracy, themes, overclocking), but
| nothing unique to the switch.
| graphe wrote:
| By the time it was thoroughly hacked, it was too late.
| Much better hardware was around. People could do most of
| what the vita was eventually able to do with a phone.
|
| Besides piracy what do you expect from the switch? The
| PSP had an ebook reader, movie player and could play mp3s
| as well as other cool old games very early in it's
| release. It could play media and play games up to the
| ps1. Modding a PSP vita today is like maxing out a citron
| 2cv instead of buying an e scooter. When the PSP came out
| it was amazing. Now it's yesterday's news. I'm impressed
| by the hackers that did it but the vita just doesn't
| impress even with hombrew today for the capabilities.
|
| The PSP had amazing battery life and felt like a better
| Gameboy advance at the time.
| fishtacos wrote:
| I wish the person I sold my fully-loaded 1/2 TB MicroSD
| Vita to a grand adventure with a pocketable
| gaming/homebrew/emulation/piracy machine. Nothing matches
| it in tis market given its capibilities. The Switch lite
| tried, but I ain't touching that crap without HDMI output
| and no mods available.
| goosedragons wrote:
| The Vita had a ton of amazing JRPGs, niche weeb stuff,
| visual novels and indie games. Bit of a weird lineup but
| for many years it was my most used system. These days the
| Vita has been cracked wide open and there's loads of
| homebrew.
|
| Right now it's only the early Switch units that are
| hackable.
| graphe wrote:
| Did you have a PSP? The vita was such a downgrade from it
| and the vita like the PSP mostly had remakes, except the
| vita had psp remakes too. It had no killer game or
| multimedia capabilities by the time it released. I can't
| name an exclusive on there at all, I don't even know if
| it had one.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Yes lol. I had a PSP shortly after launch. I still have
| one. And yes, the Vita had games and exclusives. Most of
| its launch lineup was exclusives, Uncharted Golden Abyss,
| Wipeout 2048, Hot Shots Golf World Invitational, etc.
| Even for just playing PSP games, the Vita is better. OLED
| display+ the ability to remap the right stick to the
| D-pad or buttons. Makes games like MH: Freedom Unite
| waaay better.
|
| And a lot of indie games, JRPGs, Visual Novels just fit
| the handheld form factor better than PC or PS4 even if
| they weren't exclusive.
| Grazester wrote:
| Those games ported to the switch are severely downgraded
| graphically compared to their other consoles counter parts.
| fishtacos wrote:
| My laptop runs Kbby Lake and Intel HD 620 and can't match
| the Switch's 30 fps perf. It's incredible what it can do.
| The 3070 that runs 220+W on my desktop is hard to replace
| ore minituarize.
| Grazester wrote:
| Ehh one is a gaming machine the other a general purpose
| machine with a really weak GPU.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Frankly, we still have nothing providing HD gaming on a
| handheld. The switch is way too big to be considered a
| handheld. I can't slip one into my pocket and go, like I
| could with a DS or 3DS. It's frustrating, because I love my
| 3DS for gaming on the go but there is still nothing which
| can replace it. Nintendo just gave up on the handheld
| market.
| glhaynes wrote:
| A Switch Micro would be pretty cool.
| fishtacos wrote:
| HD at 720p is more than enough for a 6" screen. The
| Switch is literally the only capable handheld that could
| do that and still does. It doesn't offer excellence, but
| it offers good enough. As already written, the Steam Deck
| replaced it a half a decade later. Not sure what your
| point is. Everything grows generatially in capability and
| capacity, including handhelds. I would not compare the
| Gameboy to the Gameboy Advance under such limitations.
| Teever wrote:
| > The switch is way too big to be considered a handheld.
|
| This seems like a pretty subjective judgment. Was the
| Sega Game Gear not a handheld console?
| hbn wrote:
| The true testament to what can be handled on a mobile device
| these days is showcased on iOS devices. The iPhone 15 Pros
| can run a port of Resident Evil 7 at supposedly a pretty
| stable 30fps.
|
| Unfortunately all of Apple's chips are stuck in Apple
| devices, where they're still struggling to incentivize
| developers to do ports as standard. So they're pumping out
| beautiful graphics to beautiful displays for games with
| shitty touch screen controls that are riddled with ads and/or
| are just glorified virtual casinos.
| sp332 wrote:
| Sure but the iPhone 15 Pro costs 3x as much and came out
| years later.
| BD103 wrote:
| Other AAA games like Tears of the Kingdom also having stunning
| graphics. It's quite impressive, though only rendered in 720p.
| MBCook wrote:
| Isn't it 1080p when docked?
| monocasa wrote:
| It's a dynamic resolution in both docked and undocked modes
| since it appears to be mainly memory bandwidth limited. It
| does max out at 900p when docked though.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > I wonder if similar optimization efforts could be carried out
| to make modern games accessible to a wider audience.
|
| I wonder, too.
| monocasa wrote:
| > The SoC also contains a cluster of four A53 cores for power
| efficient processing, but Nintendo has chosen not to use them.
|
| The rumor I've heard is that there's a bug in the system crossbar
| which makes which core CCX you enable after reset the only choice
| you can make until the system is fully reset. That is, if you
| enable the A57 CCX, later enabling the A53 CCX triggers the bug
| and vis versa, even with the first CCX disabled when enabling the
| second.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Really weird for Nintendo to have picked such a completely
| broken SoC.
| monocasa wrote:
| Probably got a really good deal on it.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| The Tegra X1 was also originally, rumoredly, not meant for
| Nintendo.
|
| https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-launches-
| tegra-x1-...
|
| It was going to be for "Deep Learning," "Computer Vision
| Applications," "NVIDIA DRIVE car computers," and robots. As
| we know, outside of some Tesla models, that didn't really
| happen.
|
| Rumoredly, according to people who have read the leaked
| Nintendo documents (Modern Vintage Gamer has implied it in
| replies to comments on his videos), NVIDIA had found the
| bug with the recovery mode before the Switch's launch; but
| Nintendo couldn't just move the announced Switch launch
| date to wait for a chip revision, especially after the Wii
| U financial performance. So, off it went and they just had
| to cross fingers and hope nobody found it. Nintendo
| probably got a good discount for that mistake too.
| parl_match wrote:
| > As we know, outside of some Tesla models, that didn't
| really happen.
|
| As YOU know.
|
| The Tegra X1 (which the switch used) was never used in
| any production automotive application, correct. But you
| mentioned Tesla, so let's talk about other Tegra
| generations.
|
| Other Tegra generations were used in Teslas in varying
| quantities (Tegra 2, 3, and K1). Mercedes has been
| shipping Tegra in their "MBUX" cars for a few years now
| as well. A couple of Chinese companies are shipping Tegra
| via NVD. Volvo, Land Rover, and Jaguar are also going to
| be shipping it shortly as well.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I don't know why you accuse me as though I said something
| wrong, and then immediately admit that, yes, the Tegra X1
| was never used in any production automotive application.
| That's what I was talking about - not Tegra as a whole.
| The only mistake I made was that the Tegra X1 wasn't used
| in any Tesla models.
| mbf1 wrote:
| This is news for nerds. Precision is important! So they
| fixed your statement. I found it interesting.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| A whole lot of the switch's design was about driving down
| costs as much as they could. That's why it has no mic,
| camera, and didn't get bluetooth headphone support for
| years after launch. Plus chipmakers _really_ want those
| console contracts, even if they make a loss on the first
| few hundred thousand sold, they 're assured sales as long
| as the console sticks around. AMD made out like bandits
| with the ps4/xbone.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| And they're likely making a killing with the Steam Deck.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| and soon will be with the PS5 and XBS(S/X) as well, if
| they aren't already
| Rapzid wrote:
| Bluetooth audio is kinda ass for gaming anyway unless you
| have low latency codec support on your source and
| consumer which is almost never the case.
|
| Sony has their own such codec which is why the audio jack
| on the PS controllers works so well..
| rkangel wrote:
| They were probably in on it when it was pre-production. This
| is something that you often want to do as a large customer so
| that you are as close to the state-of-the-art as possible,
| but it comes with downsides! I am doing a similar thing on a
| project at work at the moment.
| phonon wrote:
| The chip shipped 2 years earlier than the Switch in the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Shield_TV
|
| More likely Nintendo got a really good deal on it.
| rkangel wrote:
| Yeah, but how long was the Nintendo Switch in
| development? And bear in mind that we're comparing it to
| a much simpler bit of Nvidia electronics.
|
| It is entirely possible that it was just price based and
| they didn't care about the chip bug, but given the
| timings I still think they would have selected the chip
| before it was complete and in consumer products.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Well, I think it's important to consider the competition
| in 2017 was not great.
|
| The comparable competitive Android chip, also launched in
| late 2015, was the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. That chip was
| widely known as being one of the worst Qualcomm chips
| ever made; for mediocre power efficiency, lots of heat
| generation, thermal throttling, and a buggy first attempt
| at 64-bit instructions. All that for a GPU that is, on
| paper, significantly weaker [1] (though, maybe the
| Switch's cooling could've helped close that gap a bit).
| But even then, you're dealing with Qualcomm, and everyone
| knows they are just the worst.
|
| First, because Qualcomm loves royalties based on the
| device's MSRP, rather than a flat charge per chip.
| Nintendo probably wouldn't like that. Secondly, while
| NVIDIA GPU drivers are a proprietary blob, that's of
| little concern to Nintendo, and that blob can be easily
| adapted to run on any OS under the sun, including their
| own. Qualcomm - enjoy a hackneyed Linux fork, that's the
| best you'll get. From our perspective they're both pretty
| bad, but from Nintendo's perspective trying to add
| support to their custom microkernel Switch OS, one's
| clearly garbage.
|
| Outside of Qualcomm... what else do you have for 2017?
| Exynos and MediaTek? I think it goes without saying...
| there are no upsides to passing on the Tegra X1 for a
| MediaTek from that era.
|
| [1] Edit: I previously said 50% and 100% weaker, but
| that's very grammatically ambiguous; and FLOPs are a very
| bad metric of performance, because there are 3 different
| kinds of FLOP metrics floating around that aren't
| comparable (due to different levels of precision).
| Combined with the Tegra being designed for cooling and
| the Qualcomm designed for no cooling, it's hard to tell
| specifically how large the gap is, even though a gap is
| almost certainly there. I think my point still stands.
| my123 wrote:
| That was the SD810. The SD820 was a lot better
| my123 wrote:
| By 2014, the Tegra X1 was already picked as the Switch
| SoC.
|
| From digging at history threads: The alternative SoC
| option they had was a quad-A53 SoC with Decaf (a Wii U
| GPU cut in half with Wii backwards compat gone) co-
| designed with STMicro.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Is there anywhere one can read about those in more
| detail?
| monocasa wrote:
| I'm not sure about reading, but this was an interesting
| video on the topic linked elsewhere in this thread.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZzXidHVvJU
| CopperWing wrote:
| Nintendo chose Nvidia Tegra X1 when its previous design
| based on another custom ARM-based SoC failed:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZzXidHVvJU
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Rumor was nVidia was selling them at a discounted price since
| the only other thing (I am aware of) is the Nvidia shield
| using these chips so they went with them on that factor.
| polpo wrote:
| Gunpei Yokoi's ethos of "lateral thinking with withered
| technology" [1] has been an guiding principle within Nintendo
| since the Game & Watch days: to use "seasoned" or otherwise
| imperfect technology in creative ways. Using a broken SoC
| that they probably got a great deal on that still fits their
| needs fits perfectly in that mindset.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/@adamagb/nintendo-s-little-known-
| product-...
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| This is additionally odd because according to Wikipedia, citing
| the Technical manual (wherever you can find that), the A53
| cores were so borked that later versions of the manual removed
| all references of their existence. The Tegra X1+ shipping in
| all Switches since 2018-2019 might, possibly, not even have the
| cores.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Does anyone know what this "bug" manifests as? Your first
| sentence implies it's a lockout created at reset, but your
| second implies it manifests post-reset through user/programmer
| action.
| toast0 wrote:
| I think they're saying you get to run one CCX at a time;
| either the A57 cores or the A53 cores and you can only change
| that once after a reset. Presumably the boot time CCX is
| selected by selection pins. Depending on exactly what reset
| means, this might be something like the i286 that couldn't
| leave protected mode without a reset, so systems were built
| for OSes that entered protected mode where they could set up
| a reset vector and then cause a reset and jump back to their
| real mode kernel. Or, it might be a very intrusive reset that
| results in memory contents being reset --- that's not going
| to be something worth engineering around. Either way, it's
| easier to just only use the A57 cores to begin with, and
| especially if switching between the two is problematic.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| _Assuming_ it is some "at reset" selection, Nvidia
| advertising it as an eight-core chip would be deceptive, so
| I'm reluctant to believe such a theory. I wouldn't put it
| past marketing to do such a thing, but later revisions of
| the manual don't mention the A53 cores, so I'm inclined to
| believe it's a hardware bug.
|
| Unfortunately, without someone from inside Nvidia telling
| us, all we have are rumors and no evidence.
| toast0 wrote:
| ARM big.LITTLE systems started out as use one or the
| other, but not both simultaneously. Advertising those as
| 8 core when it's really big 4 or LITTLE 4, or later
| incantations where you could use the big or LITTLE of
| each of the four paired processors, is sketchy, but was
| common.
|
| If the plan was to allow big 4 or LITTLE 4, and then a
| hardware bug became apparent that you could switch to
| LITTLE cores but not back to big cores, well you notify
| customers and stop advertising the LITTLE cores.
| archive.org has them mentioned Jun 1 2016 [1], and then
| removed Jun 14, 2016 [2]; the A53 cores aren't mentioned
| but are shown in the die map on the current page [3].
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160601063237/http://www
| .nvidia...
|
| [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160614200203/http://www
| .nvidia...
|
| [3] https://developer.nvidia.com/content/tegra-x1
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah, I'm saying that I've heard that there's some bug
| that's only hit by running one CCX after you've run the
| other one.
|
| > Presumably the boot time CCX is selected by selection
| pins.
|
| There's actually another core, an ARM 7 referred to as the
| BPMP (Bootstrap and Power Management Processor IIRC), that
| handles main CCX bring up.
| SillyUsername wrote:
| Can anybody answer why the author wrote "indirect branches tend
| to show up in object oriented languages"?
|
| Given that branches are, well, just branches in any language,
| what makes OO so special?
|
| Also further down the author states "while FP registers have to
| be wider to handle vector execution"
|
| Again I'm pretty certain FP registers are larger owing to the
| greater precision they have, not specifically because they're
| designed for vector ops... please somebody explain why my
| understanding is wrong?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _Given that branches are, well, just branches in any
| language, what makes OO so special?_
|
| I suppose the assumption is that you get lots of virtual
| functions.
| dwaite wrote:
| > Can anybody answer why the author wrote "indirect branches
| tend to show up in object oriented languages"?
|
| While useful for function pointers and jump tables, I suspect
| they are speaking to polymorphism and vtables/witness tables.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Indirect branches are different from regular branches. A
| regular branch is 'goto label', while an indirect branch is
| like calling a function pointer or calling a virtual method
| jchw wrote:
| > Given that branches are, well, just branches in any language,
| what makes OO so special?
|
| _Indirect_ branches. This is a result of vtable indirections.
|
| You are much more likely to encounter vtables in an object
| oriented language. Obviously, you can still have the same basic
| thing in a C program, e.g. SDL RWops, but in C++ for example,
| it's going to show up all over the place.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Virtual functions yield a lot of indirect branches. Virtual
| functions are a foundational part of object oriented designs.
|
| FP registers have gotten much larger than the normal types that
| people store. e.g. 128, 256, 512-bit registers. A normal double
| floating point (pretty much the largest normally used floating
| point representation) occupies 64-bits, while a normal int64
| occupies, unsurprisingly, the same 64-bits. But we're getting
| the mega registers specifically because there are a lot of
| multiple-four-singles at once, and so on, SIMD functions.
| monocasa wrote:
| > Also further down the author states "while FP registers have
| to be wider to handle vector execution"
|
| > Again I'm pretty certain FP registers are larger owing to the
| greater precision they have, not specifically because they're
| designed for vector ops... please somebody explain why my
| understanding is wrong?
|
| ARM Neon is both 128bit SIMD and the FPU for the system.
| There's not a separate FPU from the SIMD.
| fulafel wrote:
| Indirect branches are common in many OO languages because
| calling object.method(arg) essentially does
| object.class.method(object, arg) or
| object.prototype.method(object, arg) - the address of method is
| loaded indirectly through the object's "class" field as it may
| be inherited or not.
|
| (In some cases the compiler may statically know the class of an
| object, if it's not allowing for subclassing and a potentially
| overridden method)
| crtified wrote:
| It's interesting that, on long running and well regarded (but
| obviously, not authoritative) site "HG101's Top 47k Games of All
| Time" [0], the top 50 ranked titles includes virtually no games -
| 1? 2? 3? arguably - of a technically more advanced pedigree (than
| the Switch's capabilities), in terms of applied processing grunt,
| 'graphical fidelity', etc.
|
| Expand that analysis further, to the top 100, and it remains
| true.
|
| 'Regard accumulated over time' would clearly be a factor in that
| bias, but not a definitive one. Relatively modest processors like
| the A57, and (vastly) weaker, are still the home of the majority
| of human video gaming enjoyment.
|
| [0] http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/hg101s-top-47k-games-of-
| all...
| danbolt wrote:
| Broad acclaim requires a broad minspec.
| sylware wrote:
| Next nintendo console on RISC-V!!!
| MBCook wrote:
| That would toss away any shot of backwards compatibility
| without a second processor or translation layer.
|
| I can't see how that would be beneficial.
| paoda wrote:
| A second processor isn't that crazy of an idea for Nintendo
| given the 3DS had an ARM11, ARM9, and an ARM7!
|
| Famously, the 3DS has complete GBA hardware inside of it that
| never got used outside of the Ambassador Program.
| Rapzid wrote:
| It's a well known "secret" at this point what the next chip
| will be and it's a new Tegra. Nintendo is all in on DLSS 3.5
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Just a reminder you can take a Nintendo Switch Pro controller and
| pair it to Linux via Bluetooth.
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(page generated 2023-12-13 23:00 UTC)