My guess would be a better battery life in HH mode, but upped performance in docked mode.

Whoever thought of Mariko name should be shot.

I'd take more power, specifically for improving frame rates. I am fine with the battery life.

An improved battery life is pretty much a given, but fan removal, well... at this form factor, I think it'd be impossible or reckless.

Apparently Nvidia like to name things after heros.

Marioko was supposedly the fiancee of Logan (wolverine).
So that might be why the name was picked, someone over there is a xmen fan.

If it draws like 9watts in handheld mode, and going from 20nm planear to 16nm FinFETs..... you might see a reduction to like half.

If they can get it down to 4-5watts in handheld mode, that should be possible to cool passively, without it being reckless.

*edit:
The only issue is if these are also able to dock.... passive cooling + docked modes higher power consumption = issue with heat.

But if these mini's cant dock, then its not a issue, or maybe they need a special dock to help with cooling or such.
There could be work arounds.

My guess is that portable mode will benefit from better battery and docked could probably see much higher stable gpu & cpu clocks.
Still hopefully Nvidia is working on something completely new and much stronger than this, because it's really not a needed upgrade for current Switch owners.

I expect it to be a shrink to 14/12/10nm (7nm is too expensive and too much in demand right now to produce large quantities). Probably the 12nm process NVidia is already using. However, no actual changes or redesigns in the hardware, so everything new comes with that shrink.

Which means either more power (about 30% max), more battery life (about 50% max), or a mix of both. Given that 30% more is barely visible, I think it will be better battery life except if the game explicitely calls upon the extra horsepower (those things can be programmed in)

It would also be ideal to power a smaller, thinner Switch, as it would produce less heat and run longer with a smaller battery, after all.

Removing the fan would save a lot of room for better things. It would be great if they had no internal fan, but had vents to allow cooling via a fan on the docking station like you are suggesting.

All I want from a Switch Mini, is something about the Size of the Vita, so that I can start playing my Switch collection on the go. The current device is too big for daily on the go use, and the Vita is loosing support and functionality rapidly. I just canceled the 3G for Vita, because it has become close to useless for any connected functions. Ultimately it would be incredible if Nintendo offered a 4G LTE model, but that would be beyond a miracle at this point.

Everything being shown looks great, now I just want to see what it becomes.

I concur. 12nm (Based on 16nm which in turn is based on 20nm.) would be the most ideal fit... But that is still a dramatic improvement over the archaic 20nm process.

Very interesting that Nintendo isn't just simply dropping the Pascal derived Tegra in... And nVidia decided it was worth the effort to engineer/respin a new SoC for Switch and Shield.

No reason why we can't have both performance gains and battery life gains though.