That's not true that they have to wait years to upgrade the Switch. The Switch uses the CPU core that premiered in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, 5 years ago, so putting in any modern ARM core next year would get you 3-4x CPU performance in the same power budget. As for the GPU, sure, they might only be able to double the number of GPU cores (easy enough from 20nm to 7nm) because of thermal limits, but they can do what Apple did with the iPad Pro and give it a 4x memory bus width (Switch uses a minuscule 32-bit bus, while the iPad pro and laptop GTX 1650 / mobile RX 5500 use a 128-bit bus). Combine that with faster memory like LPDDR5 and they could have up to 8x more memory bandwidth. Increase the price by $100 USD and put a current mobile chip in it. We are asking for half the CPU cores and the same memory bandwidth of any modern mobile chip, minus all the modems and neural networks and DSP (i.e. we want 1/4 the silicon of a Snapdragon 865).
The RX 5500 has 224 GB/s memory bandwidth because of GDDR6. The Switch has only 22 GB/s or so because the bus width cuts it by 1/4 and the memory is half the speed of GDDR6 also, so 1/8 to 1/10 overall.
Last edited by Alistair - on 12 December 2019
