All the Next Gen Nintendo SoC likely possibilities published by NVidia

[Pemalite]

Alistair said:

1. NO WAY: Orin Nano 4GB. 6 core CPU and 512 core GPU. 64 bit bus, only 4GB of memory, the same as the current Switch. Would work as a Switch revision or pro version, but not next gen.

Not the same.
1) Ampere is more efficient than Maxwell. + 2x extra GPU cores, potentially higher clocks, more modern feature set. (Tensor cores for DLSS)
2) Cortex A78AE is more efficient than Cortex A57. +2 extra CPU cores, more cache. Potentially higher clockrates.
3) 32% more memory bandwidth. + Bandwidth efficiency improvements all round thanks to improved Delta Colour compression.


It's a big step up, larger than what the raw numbers would otherwise imply.

Alistair said:

2. Very Likely: Orin Nano 8GB, 1024 core GPU instead of 512, a large increase, and crucially it has a 128 bit memory bus like an iPad or the TegraX2 we wanted, giving Nintendo enough memory bandwidth for the first time to run at 1080p properly. Much better than any phone. INEXPENSIVE. Cheap and powerful.

Doesn't matter if it has a 64bit or 128bit memory bus, total bandwidth matters.
And if you have memory that is fast enough, 64bit memory bus can and will beat a 128bit memory bus.

A wider bus also has the caveat of a more complex memory controller and thus drives up power consumption.

However... For 1080P you are still going to want more than 68GB/s of memory bandwidth for a good time than what Orins 128bit+LPDDR5 memory system offers... In-fact you would want triple that amount.

Otherwise texture, pixel and texel, geometry fillrates will be impacted.

To put it in perspective... Orin Nano will have less bandwidth than the base Xbox One. A sub-1080P console. That runs on DDR3.

Alistair said:

4. Not likely: Orin NX 16GB, would be good competition to the Steam Deck as it has a lot of RAM and 2 more CPU cores, but too expensive for Nintendo and lacking GPU improvements. Nice parity with the basic needs of the PS5 generation. High-res textures baby!

This part is actually the best price/performance out of the entire lineup.

It won't touch a Playstation 5. It lacks the fillrate.

Alistair said:

5. The Original Dream: Jetson AGX 32GB cutdown version of the full chip. A whopping 1792 cores. Yummy. A massive 256 bit bus like a full laptop/desktop video card. A massive 32GB of memory, though perhaps a custom version of this would work with 16GB of memory to cut costs, but retain everything else. This is M2 iPad Pro level graphics (not CPU). Faster than the PS4 Pro in every category (CPU, GPU, storage, ram, everything).

Less bandwidth than the Playstation 4 Pro.
Less single precision floating point than the Playstation 4 Pro. - Especially when you use GCN's strengths like asynchronous compute.

Likely less Render Output Pipelines and Texture Mapping units too. Mostly because it's a mobile part. - Although couldn't actually find detailed information on this.

Alistair said:

Everything above this is impossible and expensive. Note that Orin supports nVME storage now, unlike the Tegra X1, so we could get fast storage as well like the Xbox/PS5.

Would likely use UFS anyway.

Doctor_MG said:

The T239 is based off of the T234 chip, which is the Jetson AGX. The leak says that it has 12 SM's. Ampere includes 128 CUDA cores per SM, so T239 will have 1536 CUDA cores. This doesn't match up with any of the Orin modules released, which means there is more customization than what we found with the Switch. In addition, T239 has an 8-core CPU on a single cluster which means it CANNOT be the first three anyway.

That said, this doesn't mean that Switch 2 will have 32GB of RAM. As you can see, despite being based on T234 it does not have the same amount of SM's (likely for die reduction). In addition, since it has 8-cores on a single cluster instead of 4-cores on two or three clusters we see further customization (again likely for die reduction). It's very possible, in fact practically guaranteed, that Nintendo will opt to customize the amount of RAM that is used as well. I would not be surprised if we see something like 10GB of RAM with 2GB reserved for OS functionality (kind of like the Series S).

Basically, I think people are underestimating the partnership between Nvidia and Nintendo this time around.

nVidia scales these chips upwards and downwards depending on market or segment. Doesn't mean it's customized, just binned differently. (Or die harvested.)

Bofferbrauer2 said:

TDP is probably too high in the NX models. Nintendo would need to severely undervolt and underclock them to make them usable in handheld mode, creating too much of a gap between handheld and desktop mode.

As a result, I expect the Nano 8 as the most probable choice.

Some aggressive turbo while docked would make the Nano 8 actually fairly potent.