Switch OLED model just got announced.

[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

There hasn't been any new Tegra announced or leaked which could have pointed at it, so there simply wasn't any new hardware possible apart from a Switch (ha!) to X2. But since the die-shrink of the X1, the performance advantage of the X2 would be slim at best. It's successors Xavier, Orin and Atlan, all of them being developed with the automotive industry in mind, are way too large and power-consuming to be of any use in a handheld without modification. In Xavier's case, it's the Volta GPU that was 100% geared for HPC and other industrial work and is just very unefficient as a gaming GPU. Also, Orin and Atlan are late, with Orin only really releasing next year and Atlan in 2025.

As a result, there is a distinct lack of viable option for a hardware upgrade until next year earliest unless NVidia would go on and make a totally custom Tegra chip for Nintendo, something NVidia has denied to be willing to do several times over.

Like I said in another thread, Nintendo may wish to keep it's SoC back on an older process node in order to not suffer the same fate as other chip manufacturers with the global shortage.
16nm FF is a good node. Old. But reliable and not congested.
Nintendo/nVidia does have room to move these designs to 12nm FF if they see the need which can accept designs from 16nm FF fairly easily... But keeping them back on 16nm is definitely the smart choice in 2021. (Even if it shits me off.)

As for Maxwell vs Pascal, throughput of those SoC's tend to be identical on a per-clock basis.
However in Pascals defense, nVidia did allot of re-working in order to mitigate any clocking bottlenecks so it was able to run at 50% higher clockrates than Maxwell. (The new node definitely helped keep power levels static however.)

Plus you also have improvements to Delta Colour Compression, one of the largest bottlenecks of the Switch and Tegra X1 is actually memory bandwidth, especially when allot of Alpha Effects come into play, DCC4 would provide Tegra X2 roughly 20% extra bandwidth through efficiency gains alone.

And then you mentioned Xavier, Orin and Atlan.
Yes they are designed for the Automotive industry, but there is a 10w Xavier variant which would offer substantial gains over Tegra X1. At 10w.

Orin and Atlan can also have cut-down designs as well, that would be suitable to the Switch. Might cost Nintendo an extra dollary-do, but it's still more than possible.

Just because a chip is designed for a certain market, doesn't meant it can't be taken and used in another market, chip manufacturers do it all the time.

Yeah, I know they can be transformed to be used in another market. But you're glossing over the points I made before.

1. Xavier's Volta GPU is inadequate for mobile use as it's built with HPC and AI in mind and thus too power-consuming at same node and power draw compared to Pascal and Maxwell. Switch reportedly only draws 3W in handheld mode, and the NX 10W would need to cut almost all the power from the GPU's side since the CPU is already down to a quad-core with only 1.2Ghz, and even in console mode it would have some reduced power and thus performance for sure. I doubt Xavier with the same power draw could boost performance by more than 15-20% unless CPU limited (Carmel has about 80% higher IPC than the A57)
2. Orin ain't even out yet and won't be for another year, while Atlan isn't out for another 4 years. So they can't be used anytime soon.
3. NVidia has mentioned several times that they don't want to make custom or semi-custom chips like AMD does, So Nintendo is limited to the models NVidia produces - and neither of those is any good for the Switch.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 07 July 2021