Ahhh I've been avoiding NX rumor-mongering for so long but this morning it finally bit me and it bit me HARD!
Generally though, I'm anchoring my expectations to Emily Roger's rumors.
Recap of Emily Rogers' sources regarding NX:
1. No x86. She didn't say ARM, but that's the only other viable option because Nintendo sure as **** isn't sticking with PowerPC.
2. Polaris rumors are "wacky."
3. Uses "special, custom made chips," hardware design is very modern.
4. Closer to Xbox One than PS4. Cue Ian freaking the **** out.
Recap of Adrock's thoughts:
1. I started leaning toward the ARM camp about a month or two ago once I actually read up on it. ARM makes the most sense for what it seems Nintendo wants to do and where the industry is heading moving forward.
2. Polaris would have been nice, but the timing was off. It seemed more feasible with a March 2017 launch but still iffy.
3. No surprises there. Nintendo always uses custom chips. The modern hardware design is the most important bit. NX needs to be able to run current engines. It's more important to be powerful enough to run these than more powerful than PS4 let alone PS4K/Neo.
4. This is the part I suspect will get the most attention, and it shouldn't. For how Nintendo has to approach NX, its place in the market, and consumers, price is more important than hardware power. Nintendo cannot launch NX for more than $300 and expect anyone besides its own fanbase to give a ****. In fact, $300 might be pushing it since that's around where PS4 and One are now. If NX hardware could outperform PS4 at $300, great, but that gets into economics I'm not privy to. There are ARM chips that outperform PS4's Jaguar-based CPU, but it wouldn't come cheap.
I generally accept the first 3 with no argument. I was at some point jazzed to think x86 but I can see an ARM solution as more likely, ESPECIALLY if the handheld version itself is also on ARM.
Number 3 though tells me frankly nothing. "Modern" hardware to me is just marketing talk about how they're not off-the-shelf and they're doing some custom work on it.
As for Number 2/4, this actually make a good bit of sense given Nintendo's home consoles tracking to the last generation (The Wii was 2.5 GameCubes, the Wii U punched above an XBox 360, it would fit for the NX to track towards an XBox One target).
However, I have no reason for thinking that other than it fits a pattern. It still SEEMS to continue to trend, which is why I'll stick with it for now.
The same "track last gen" trend also seems to manifest in Nintendo's handhelds: The GBA got SNES ports, the DS got N64 ports, the New 3DS got a little ambitious with porting Xenoblade from the Wii.
I have no reason to be, but this morning I'm obsessed with the Tegra rumors. The already-released Tegra X1 would make a lot of sense to me as the chipset for the Handheld NX version, especially because it looks like it might have the raw power to be a "Wii U in a handheld" and fit the above trend. It'd also be a chip designed specifically for the limitations of a handheld in terms of heating and power consumption.
Of course, if the Tegra X1 was in the handheld, then there'd have to be a different chipset for the console NX? That console chipset, whatever it is, I'm guessing would be ARM (Number 1 from above), and probably hew closely with other rumors of AMD working on a new ARM APU order.
I've all of a sudden got in my head that, yeah, the NX is a platform, not a single system. Nintendo will position it as a shared ecosystem between both a handheld and a console, and provide development tools where you can build the same game for BOTH easily. There would be obvious differences between performance for the two hardware environments, but most games would be built on technology that accounts for scaling from square one (or just be a rare game that only exists on one and not the other).
That sorta reminds of the PS4K rumors where the new PS4 will have stronger hardware, but would basically run the same PS4 disc just with some graphical improvements if available (ala GBC->GB, or N64ExpansionPak->N64).
In my fever dreams I see them doing something big for cross-purchases too.
And oooh the cartridge rumors! Someone brought that up to me at work a couple weeks ago and I dismissed it out of hand, but then now that I've read back a couple pages about the benefits of removing the optical drive, the already impressive capacity of those existing 3DS carts, and also remembering the falling pricing of memory... They'd still need to be able up the capacity for the cart to at least single-layer Blu Ray amounts if they go this route though.