Wall Street Journal: Nintendo to release two new Switch models as early as summer

[Bofferbrauer2]

Jumpin said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

He's probably referencing the 3DS's late games, which technically ran on a 3DS, but where such a stuttery mess that they were only really playable on a New 3DS.

The big question for these models is the hardware. Did NVidia relent and make custom chips for Nintendo now? Or will it just be an X2 with 2 different clock speed settings (basically switch and switch plus modes)?

Also, I seriously hope for a bigger battery. These things have gotten a lot cheaper and more compact over the last 2 years, so unless the weight gain would be too much I don't see why not going for about 5500-6000 mAh (30% increase, basically 1 hour more in demanding titles if the consumption is the same)

I'm pretty happy with my Switch right now, not going to upgrade anytime soon. If however the OG Switch may get too sluggy, I will possibly upgrade later down the road - but not before 2021. My nephew or my niece would then probably inherit the base model.

What I find interesting is the timing. With the slew of games coming out this year, Switch will already sell let hot pancakes, so I was expecting new hardware to only come out next year to keep the sales high. Maybe the fact that some bugs cracked the security of the X1 chip and it not being patchable could have been used as leverage to get a new, safe chip from NVidia. I guess we'll see at E3 (I don't imagine Nintendo squanders that announcement on anything less than their E3 direct)

In any case (lame pun considering what's gonna follow), I don't think the dimensions will change much, if at all. That would allow to upgrade the cheap one with more feature-rich Joycons (one feature removed for instance is vibration according to the kokatu article I read) and allow Labo to work with the new models without a fuss. They could also keep the current Dock and cables (and this time implement USB 3.x correctly, please) in production.

In other words, only the internals would change, but the external dimension will be left unchanged - it's too standardized to change them now.

I think you’re absolutely right on this. Although, it is not likely that games will be given a pass if their performance on the Switch 1 model are too rough before a certain date. This is up to Nintendo. For example, ~2022 might mark a point where performance on the older model becomes less strict, but older models must be supported. Then  ~2024 is where Nintendo drops support for older models - which could still mean they will test software on older models to ensure it doesn’t cause any major bugs (like bricking or 100% crashes).

I’m in the same boat, if a new Switch does come out, I will either wait for generation 3 or a cheap sale of generation 2 down the road. Although better joycon tech (which I don’t expect, now) and better battery life would probably convince me to make the jump early.

As for Nvidia, they have the Xavier and Orin chipsets. I don’t know a great deal about these, or their dimensions and power requirements. Only that they are used for devices paired with cars. Custom versions of these (or one of these) are conceivably what could be used in the Switch 2 family. That would be a substantial upgrade.

Xavier and Orin could be adapted, sure. But both would need some serious modifications first to be worthwhile. The Tensor cores are useless in the Switch and have to go, for instance. I also fear the 512 SP of Xavier can't stay without having to be clocked below their sweet spot imo. 384SP should be fine however, and combined with a clock speed boost would already have a nice performance increase.

Next, I'm not sure if Nintendo would really use 8 Carmel cores or just 4 and clocking them higher. Being based on Cortex A73 probably, that alone would give a sweet performance boost, but if the clock speed would be increased to, say, 1.6Ghz, that would suffice to more than double CPU performance already while staying on 4 cores (personally, I think 6 cores would be the best compromise right now).

I do think they should at the very least try to keep the bandwidth of Xavier, though, which is 5 times the bandwidth of the Switch. This would widen the worst bottleneck of the Switch quite a lot.

On Orin, I have no information yet. Considering Nintendo prefers proven hardware, Orin is probably out of question anyway. Even Xavier only came online in Fall last year, which might have been too late to adapt it to the upcoming hardware. As such, I think an adaption of Xavier or Orin may come, but it probably won't be this one yet. Maybe a 2021/2022 Switch model upgrade or a 2023/2024 successor would come with such hardware. But that's just speculation and we're going to see what Nintendo plans next anyway.