We know Nintendo are working on another console, it’s even been confirmed to their shareholders – but we don’t know much else. There have been a few specs which have floated about the internet regarding a Fusion Terminal and Fusion DS, to which we’ve done an analysis on but the specs looked a little suspect to say the least.
Industry insider Ashan Rasheed, perhaps better known as Thuway has reported on Twitter a rather different set of rumors – that Nintendo’s next generation machine will be a hybrid of both a regular console (like the Wii U) and a portable (in other words, also function as a DS).
Rumors are afloat Nintendo’s next hardware will function as a hybrid console and handheld. I don’t understand why.
— Ahsan Rasheed (@thuway) June 1, 2014
If such a platform exists, Nintendo will create something similar in spec to Vita. Mobile tech still lag behinds 360/PS3 era visuals @ 720p.
— Ahsan Rasheed (@thuway) June 1, 2014
“Rumors are afloat Nintendo’s next hardware will function as a hybrid console and handheld. I don’t understand why. If such a platform exists, Nintendo will create something similar in spec to Vita. Mobile tech still lag behinds 360/PS3 era visuals @ 720p,” says Thuway
Does this tie in at all to the Fusion platforms? Fusion would make ‘sense’ I suppose given the specs of the machine – perhaps it’s an evolution of the idea of Nintendo’s Wii U Gamepad. Then again, the Wii U pad was met with mixed reception from gamer’s. Some loved it, while others (particularly during action games) pointed to it being slow and awkward to use.
If it is just a single console, and the idea behind Fusion Terminal and Fusion DS have been scrapped, we could indeed be seeing an ARM type of device. Sure, it’s true that devices such as Nvidia’s K1 puts out almost 400GFLOPS but even if Nintendo were to use a GPU twice that powerful (so about 759GFLOPS), it’d lag significantly behind both the Playstation 4 and Xbox One in terms of raw power. It would likely be ARM based, but there are X86 CPU’s (from both AMD and Intel) which could potentially be used – but of course, all of this is pure speculation right now.
It’;s a rather curious state of affairs, but unfortunately there just isn’t enough information to make a judgement one way or the other. Often when a next console design is being considered, teams experiment with different pieces of hardware to see what ‘works’ and what doesn’t work in terms of providing the performance and experience the company are looking for within the realms of realism (ease to mass produce, cost, heat and so on). So it’s possible that both the hybrid console and the other alternative Fusion Terminal and Fusion DS are both just experiments.
From the point of view of games development, I don’t know how well both developers and the public would receive a hybrid console. For developers, would they be happy with the prospect of potentially porting cross platform titles to a system that’s at best, a third to half as powerful as the Xbox One? It would likely mean some games simply wouldn’t run on Nintendo’s Hybrid, at least without huge changes to the game engine – particularly for future titles when developers are no longer creating games with the Xbox 360 or PS3 in mind.
For gamer’s, how ‘happy’ would they be buying a console which they perceive to be considerably weaker than the competition? Unless they buy into the fact it’s both a mobile platform and a console – then it could well sell like hotcakes. Nintendo’s handhelds typically do extremely well – much better than their recent consoles, with the exception of the original Wii.
It’s a curious state of affairs indeed, and Nintendo typically love to be different and innovative.
