Is the Switch 2 Getting ORIN (2022) or ATLAS (2025) Nvidia Tegra chip for a 2025 release?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Orin or some AMD mobile chip, maybe a Snapdragon, but anything else is probably not a viable option

Leynos said:

They better stick with Nvidia so all my cart games work in BC.

Considering the performance uplift, they could achieve that through emulation without too much of a hustle

Alistair said:

Orin is ready now. Can launch any time now, the economic slowdown means nothing is in short supply now. 5nm is available, ram is available, everything is becoming abundant.

Also Nintendo could still just release a 5nm revision of the original Tegra.... fanless design.

7 or 5nm Tegra X1 could come next year as a final upgrade for the current Switch. Might not be fanless, but should achieve higher clock speeds and better battery life. The 5nm option could also help Nvidia out with their excess wafers at TSMC, so I definitely think that this could be an on the table. 

eddy7eddy said:

PAOerfulone said:

Between the two options and knowing Nintendo, they'll likely go with ORIN for a 2025 release since it'll allow them to sell the Switch 2 at a profit right out of the gate, which is something they always try to do with all their systems.
As a gamer, I'd love for them to go with ATLAS, sell at a loss, and make up for it with software sales, subscriptions, and continued Switch 1 hardware and software sales. That way the Switch 2 will be more advanced and more capable of running the major 3rd party games, which in turn will really benefit them towards the latter part of that system's life cycle.
But seeing as how their financial outlook will be FAR more dependent on the success of their next gen system, since it'll be the only next gen system they launch as opposed to a separate console and handheld, then the former is the more likely route they will go.

I really wish they take the risk with ATLAS, ORIN Production modules will be available at the end of this year for $399 and it's a new chip, I understand the extra cost of everything, but they can get a good deal.

That price is way too high for a console, but by 2024/2025 it should be cheap enough to be an option.

As even the small one consumes too much to have a viable battery life without making it too heavy to be handheld, Nintendo will have to lower the clock speeds, with a CPU speed of probably ~1.5Ghz (Orin reaches 2Ghz) and GPU ~700Mhz (Orin: 918Mhz) to get power consumption down to less than 8W

Over on the AMD side of things, Rembrandt has shown that AMD can now make really high performing APUs on a tight power budget. A low-power spinoff/successor from there could be used both in an upcoming Switch successor and AMD could use them in their ultra-low-power line (which to this day is still on 14/12nm chips, go figure)

A Rembrandt derivative would probably come with less CU, probably 6 or maybe 8, as 12 would need too much power to feed through. Also possible would be less cores, six cores would be better to keep consumption down without bottlenecking, but I'm not sure if this is an option with AMD and Zen 3. Disabling Hyperthreading is the more likely option in my opinion. Even then, CPU clock speeds would probably go down to somewhere between 2-2.3Ghz and also the GPU clock speeds would need to get cut down somewhat, possibly ~1.6Ghz (No idea what the RDNA2 sweet spot is, so this is just wild guessing).

Since the release is still years away, some Zen4/RDNA3 chip could also be very possible. How that one would stack up in terms of power consumption is still unknown so far however, so we'll have to wait and see what will be possible with those chips in a handheld format.