Nintendo has had a very successful handheld platform on offer with the Switch since 2017. Even though many of the games are still impressive today, the Nvidia Tegra X1 installed is now clearly showing its age. Nintendo wants to make significant improvements with the successor, and this could be possible with a new SoC from Nvidia.
Nintendo Switch 2: Financial report blurts out release date
More cores, smaller conductor tracks
A hot candidate for the Switch 2 APU is the recently emerged SoC T239 from Nvidia. Instead of being manufactured using the 20-nanometer process, the new chip at Samsung will be manufactured using the 8-nanometer process. This is intended to reduce power consumption and enable more performance on a similarly large chip area. With eight A78 cores, the processor should also offer significantly more performance than the four Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores in the current switch.
Four times as many shader cores
Nintendo also apparently wants to make significant gains in the graphics unit of the Switch 2: the basis for the new GPU is Nvidia’s Ampere architecture. The graphics unit should therefore be significantly more powerful with 1,280 GPU shaders than the currently installed Maxwell graphics unit with only 256 shaders. However, how much Nintendo wants to increase the RAM on the Switch 2 remains unclear. The games on the Switch currently have to make do with a measly 4 GB of RAM.
Detached technology
Even with the newer combination processor from Nvidia, the Switch 2 would certainly not be a high-end product. Both the CPU and GPU architecture of the successor would be outdated by the time it goes on sale. But with the current Switch, Nintendo had already gained many new customers with relatively old technology. They are now waiting for a hardware upgrade of the outdated handheld console. A Switch 2 with an eight-core CPU and 1,280 shader units seems like a relief for many gamers.
