26th October 2016, 9:40 PM
Nintendo usually isn't shy about advertising backwards compatibility. Even with the DS, their last "third pillar" system, they were pretty up front about the GBA slot on the bottom of the system.
As for NVidia's main processor chipset, yeah, it's ARM based. Pretty much every portable device that isn't a laptop (which would therefor need to run x86 programs) uses ARM now. That goes from the Gameboy Advance to the iPad to my Android Phone to the "non-Pro" Microsoft Surface systems. Their design isn't the only way to design a RISC processor (the N64 uses a RISC based design, for example), but it's the standard that took hold, much like x86 did in the PC world. RISC's advantages over x86 stem chiefly from how power efficient they are and how well the power use scales with actual processor use (an idle RISC processor uses far less power than an idle x86 processor). I won't get into the details here, but it's this reason that NVidia, when designing a mobile chipset, decided to go with ARM instead of an x86 design. x86 still has some power related advantages, but ARM is catching up. x86 isn't resting when it comes to power usage either, but the two designs are so fundamentally different that there's no way to design a "two in one" architecture that can switch between them without flat out just making a dual-processor board, which doesn't really solve anything.
NVidia's graphics chipset is another story entirely, as it's their own proprietary design (like most GPUs). That one's going to more closely resemble NVidia's desktop graphics card, but optimized to reduce power drain. In any case, that wouldn't affect backwards compatibility, which as far as the 3DS is concerned only the ARM chips matters.
As for NVidia's main processor chipset, yeah, it's ARM based. Pretty much every portable device that isn't a laptop (which would therefor need to run x86 programs) uses ARM now. That goes from the Gameboy Advance to the iPad to my Android Phone to the "non-Pro" Microsoft Surface systems. Their design isn't the only way to design a RISC processor (the N64 uses a RISC based design, for example), but it's the standard that took hold, much like x86 did in the PC world. RISC's advantages over x86 stem chiefly from how power efficient they are and how well the power use scales with actual processor use (an idle RISC processor uses far less power than an idle x86 processor). I won't get into the details here, but it's this reason that NVidia, when designing a mobile chipset, decided to go with ARM instead of an x86 design. x86 still has some power related advantages, but ARM is catching up. x86 isn't resting when it comes to power usage either, but the two designs are so fundamentally different that there's no way to design a "two in one" architecture that can switch between them without flat out just making a dual-processor board, which doesn't really solve anything.
NVidia's graphics chipset is another story entirely, as it's their own proprietary design (like most GPUs). That one's going to more closely resemble NVidia's desktop graphics card, but optimized to reduce power drain. In any case, that wouldn't affect backwards compatibility, which as far as the 3DS is concerned only the ARM chips matters.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)