NVIDIA has some experience in making consoles, we’ve seen it participate in the GPU of the first Xbox, PlayStation 3, the main chip of the Nintendo Switch and most likely its successor is theirs and let’s not talk about their eventual Shield devices that came out at the time. However, at this point we will focus on the ability that NVIDIA may have to launch its own video game system. The reason? It has the technology to do it and we’ll tell you why.
Is an NVIDIA console possible?
Although NVIDIA Grace is a processor designed for use in servers thanks to its 144 cores and intended for use with the GPU for high performance computing H100, nothing prevents NVIDIA from launching a much simpler version which is combined with an RTX 40 built on a single chip. Obviously with fewer cores and using GDDR6 memory instead of HBM.
One of the keys to NVIDIA graphics cards, which aren’t used in PCs but in other devices, is that they have memory addressing that’s fully compatible with the company’s ARM ISA processors. This makes it possible to create a fully unified memory system where both parties share the same memory pool without having to use copy mechanisms. Something that PC has been looking for for a long time, but is complicated from the moment we have the RAM and VRAM separated in two different wells.
Thus, said console’s chip would not be x86, but compatible with ARM binaries and therefore the games would have to be compiled again in the new binary to run on the NVIDIA console. However, the advantage of Jen Hsen Huang’s company is that they have great relationships with various console and PC game developers.
The business model
It would be the same as for all consoles, selling cheap hardware and recouping royalties from software and the sale of peripherals. The console would be entirely based on the sale and distribution of games through the official NVIDIA store and the operating system would be a variant of Linux with the console menu and the NVIDIA store integrated.
On the other hand, the NVIDIA console could have paid online like the PlayStation and Xbox consoles, but with integrated services like GeForce Now to be able to try the games without having to install them and possibly a catalog of on-demand rental games that you can select to take advantage of the new system. So it would not be different in this regard from the consoles that we have on the market.
The key to everything, like everything at NVIDIA, is AI
And we come to the crux of the matter, the most important part of it all, which will be nothing more than the service that NVIDIA could offer to port its PC games to the new console with little effort and using AI to transfer the binaries. from x86 to ARM easily.
For this, binary rewrite would be used, which tries to modify the source binary to make it compatible with the destination binary. It is a technique that does not require computing power because it is not done hot, but rather on the source code, but it can end up having errors, so it may require the intervention of a third party. Well, one solution to that is to use AI and in specific neural networks that learn the correlation between x86 and ARM instructions, the same way a language is learned.
Once the system has learned, the system can move code from one set of registers and instructions to another with very little margin for error and reducing development costs. Keep in mind that a conversion, although cheaper than a game from scratch, can cost several million dollars and with the use of AI it can be reduced to a few thousands.
