Back to Blog
Super mario 64 last impact on hardware6/24/2023 ![]() Digital currently accounts for 48.2% of software sales, and although they didn't report this as a percentage before, at a rough estimate it would have been around 11-12% in that first FY. This past FY it was 405.2B yen, or a bit over 25% of revenue. In Switch's first full FY on the market, Nintendo's digital revenue was 60.8B yen, under 6% of overall revenue. The increasing move to digital also makes it less and less worthwhile for Nintendo to spend the money on high-speed game cards. Outside of Nintendo, it's been a decade since you could buy any device which can play games directly off the physical media. Mandatory installs is almost a forbidden phrase around here, but it's been the standard in the rest of the industry for a long time now. Games that require fast storage get installed when you first plug them in and get to make use of the much faster internal storage (or hopefully fast external storage). Games that don't need super-fast storage can run directly off the game card and get ~150MB/s. The simpler solution is just that some games require installing from the game card, without any download. Perhaps they could make the card a bit wider and add another column of pins for the new protocol, although they'd have to do so in a way that it's easy and obvious how to insert existing Switch game cards into the same slot. ![]() Adding another row above it wouldn't really leave much space to hold it. The pins on the Switch game card already take up almost half of the back of the card. One potential issue with adding extra pins is where you place them. Nintendo could also design their own interface, as they have done up to this point. The latest spec would achieve speeds of about 1GB/s. MIPI's D-PHY is perhaps more suitable as an out-of-the-box option for asymmetrical data requirements, which is commonly used for cameras and displays in mobile devices. ![]() These are overkill for Nintendo's use-case, though, as they're both bi-directional, whereas Nintendo only needs high speeds in one direction. Both of these interfaces are built into Orin already, and presumably T239, too. MIPI M-PHY 4.1 with two lanes (4 data pins) would exceed 2GB/s, and one lane (2 data pins) would exceed 1GB/s. One lane (4 data pins) of PCIe 4.0 would give them up to 2GB/s of bandwidth. There are, of course, a lot of options available to them. If they want to maintain backwards compatibility, that would mean adding extra pins, as with the SD examples. The alternative would be to use a different interface than SPI. Continuing on the same trend, we'd expect a clock of around 150MHz, and read speeds of around 150MB/s on game cards if they update the existing interface. ![]() That means that over the past three generations of game cards, they've increased the interface speed by about 3x each time. Both DS and 3DS game cards also used an 8 bit SPI-style interface (different from Switch's, though), with the DS using 4.2MHz/6.7MHz clocks, and the 3DS using 16.6MHz. I'd be surprised if they went with a substantially higher SPI interface speed, though (ie more than 100-200MHz). I don't think this represents a limit of the technology, as you can easily find 20 year old devices using 50MHz SPI interfaces, it's just that manufacturers have moved away from SPI to other interfaces when they need hundreds of MB/s. Most SPI devices max out at around 50MHz or so, with a couple at about 100MHz. Unfortunately I can't find many examples of SPI-style interfaces clocking significantly higher than this. If to use the same game card format without extra pins, then the limit (aside from the game cards themselves, security ASICs, etc.) would be how high they can clock the interface. Supported clock speeds are 25MHz and 50MHz, which gives bandwidth of either 25MB/s or 50MB/s. As per SwitchBrew, the game card uses an 8 bit SPI-style interface.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |