Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design

Re:Thoughts about the difference between European and Americ... by monocasa on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @09:56PM (#23993570)

> It seems that most of the actual OS layer of the switch is designed to be hardware independent. I mean they managed to run Skyrim on ARM so it's not a stretch to say it wouldn't take much effort to move to a different SoC. Maybe using a different SoC would be difficult with Linux, but it doesn't seem the case with the OS they're using.

There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that the games are tied specifically to this SoC. The closest you'd be able to get would be running the games in an emulator.

> uITRON stuff

Their OS really isn't uITRON derived, but I can believe they took the exFAT stack from there.

You can see the shape of the OS here, and it's pretty different from uITRON. https://switchbrew.org/wiki/SVC There might be a compat layer in the driver process for the exFAT driver though. They threw in a FreeBSD kernel space compat layer for their IP stack process for instance.

> This thread started because of a statement on "Asian companies"

That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the switch is Japanese hardware.

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Re:Thoughts about the difference between European and Americ... by knolax on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @11:53PM (#23994465)

> There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that the games are tied specifically to this SoC.

You're missing the point. If they can port a third party x86 game using a notoriously janky decades old game engine to ARM then they can easily move to using a different SoC if need be.

> That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the switch is Japanese hardware.

You were being pedantic about what is and isn't hardware engineering. You can't just sell a bare PCB with a SoC on it.

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