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NVIDIA could release a (new) console that competes with Xbox and PlayStation

NVIDIA has some experience making consoles, we have already seen it participate in the GPU of the first Xbox, in the 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 which came out at the time. However, at this point we are going to focus on the ability that NVIDIA may have to launch its own video game system. The reason? It has technology to do it and we are going to explain why.

Is an NVIDIA console possible?

Although NVIDIA Grace is a processor designed for use in servers thanks to its 144 cores and is intended to be used together with the GPU for high-performance computing H100, nothing prevents NVIDIA from launching a much simpler version that is combined with an RTX 40 built on a single chip. Obviously with fewer cores and using GDDR6 memory instead of HBM.

NVIDIA RISC-V GPUs

One of the keys to NVIDIA graphics cards, which is not used on PCs, but is used on other devices, is that they have memory addressing fully consistent with the company’s ISA ARM CPUs. This allows to create a fully unified memory system where both parties share the same memory pool without having to use copy mechanisms. Something that in PC has been looking for a long time, but that is complicated from the moment that we have the RAM and the VRAM separated in two different wells.

So the chip of said console would not be x86, but compatible with ARM binaries and, therefore, the games would need to be compiled again in the new binary to work on the NVIDIA console. However, the advantage of Jen Hsen Huang’s company is that they have excellent relationships with different game developers on consoles and PC.

The business model

This would be the same as that of all the consoles, sell the cheap hardware and recover with the royalties of the software and the sale of peripherals. The console would be based entirely 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 integrated NVIDIA store.

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 enjoy the new system. So it would not be different in this regard than the consoles 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 all this, 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.

Home Ghost Box AI

For this, the 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 computational power as it is not done hot, but rather on the source code, but it may end up having errors, so it may require third-party intervention. Well, one solution to this is to use AI and in specific neural networks that learn the correlation between x86 and ARM instructions, in the same way that a language is learned.

Once the system has learned, the system can move code from one set of registers and instructions to another with a very low margin of error and cutting development costs. Keep in mind that a conversion, despite being cheaper than a game from scratch, can cost several million dollars and with the use of AI it can be reduced to a few thousand.

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