64-bit Nvidia Tegra 6 "Parker" Chip May Arrive in 2014

[somebodyspecial]

lol i bet in a couple of years mobile phones will be more powerful then next gen consoles

I'll bet you this is either true or damned close to it... But it's like saying "I'll bet you that I could make a Linux rig that ran games faster than a Windows rig" right now. Again, probably true depending on how you go about it, but it doesn't count for crap unless you actually have games that run on it.

Phones will suffer the same hamstringing that PC's have for decades. If you make a game for a Galaxy S6/iPhone7, but you don't make the game to run on an iPhone 4 and a Galaxy S3, you're probably cutting out more than half of your market, since most people have some sort of legacy hardware. In the case of phones, if they do end up beating consoles for power, that legacy hardware will be a combination of old phones (see: less powerful than current consoles) and current consoles, so I doubt you'll ever see that potential fulfilled - at least, not until the legacy hardware is only a small portion of the market.

People buy (re-buy) 1 Billion SMART phones per year (~350mil tablets). Even the low end at 14nm will catch consoles. So in 3 yrs you'll have 1Billion devices to sell to and they are upgraded each year (dropped etc). If you aim a AAA game at a T5 today, takes 1-2yrs to make it, all but the WORST of that 1billion sold say xmas or 2half 2014, will be able to play it as by xmas 2015 when your game is done polished etc read for consumption even the junk is T5 capable (which looks to be Q1 next year, mere months away). If I was starting a game today I wouldn't aim at anything under whatever I think T5/Rogue6/T678 etc will be capable of. Even if I'm wrong, I won't be 6 months -1yr later...ROFL. In Q1 Tegra4i will be in $100-200 phones. That's 5/6th's of the full T4's power in a junker aimed at Asia/India. Fortunately phones/tablets aren't like the LOW-END in PC's where we have Intel's crap graphics.

Consoles sell 10mil/year each (30mil x 7.5yrs ~340mil total over their life). Galaxy S4 sells 100mil in a year (iphone too). 3x the combines sales of consoles every year on JUST ONE MODEL. Consoles will be cast aside by phones/tablets etc that can hook up your x360 gamepad (ps4 probably too, they already claim to work with PC's) and output to your TV either by HDMI, Widi, or Miracast. Either way, consoles won't sell 350mil this time total. A phone/tablet etc and a gamepad is all you need for the wave of AAA games that will be coming to Android this year and next. 60% of game devs are planning stuff or in process for mobile. 11% for consoles (just a plan, not making anything now, they're waiting for Q1 sales before committing to console, except for EA, Sony, MS, Blizzard, the big guys only).

You don't care about cutting out half the market with a market that is the size of 3yrs of console sales TOTAL together being sold every year in ONE UNIT of phones. Each year another huge group has the ability to run that game as low end comes up in power. So in your example if they made a game for S4 today, they'd have a game that could run on 100mil units today, probably another 200mil on S5/S6 later in 2yrs. That's 7.5years of consoles to be sold to catch just that phone...ROFL. Also it's easy to port from samsung to regular android etc. It's not like porting from DirectX to linux/openGL. That is a job. Samsung's OS is just a slightly tweaked android.

 

[knowom]

64 bit doesn't do a whole lot on PC so I have doubts on it being of much benefit on a smart phone or tablet outside of bragging rights race between the different companies.

 

[renz496]

64 bit doesn't do a whole lot on PC so I have doubts on it being of much benefit on a smart phone or tablet outside of bragging rights race between the different companies.

well at least nvidia. they have very good reason going for 64 bit for their cpu. initially people expect Denver will exist inside Maxwell gpu. with their own cpu+gpu in one package it might possible for them to offer HPC system without any x86 processor. honestly i was surprise when they show Denver to be Tegra 6 from their roadmap.

 

[rwinches]

In the near future your smartphone will be your PC.
When you get to the office or at home you dock it and it uses a full size monitor and KB, the dock can have additional processing, graphics power and drives, though a lot of storage/apps would be in the cloud.