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shikamaru317 on 08 March 2023
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Slownenberg said:
shikamaru317 said:

Yep, and the chipset that the new Switch seems to be using, the Orin based Tegra T239, was first rumored in 2021 and back in September 2022, the Nvidia employee confirmed it was a real chipset he was working on. I think it's safe to say this chipset will be done soon, and I agree that it doesn't make much sense to sit on a finished chipset design for a year or more just to push Switch 2 to 2025, especially since Switch 1 sales are clearly on the decline now. 

You're saying a chipset the next gen Switch is rumored to use isn't even out yet??? Let's remember that Switch released in 2017 and used a 2015 chip. If Nintendo is indeed using a chipset that isn't even available yet that almost certainly means a holiday 2024 or sometime in 2025 release date. Of course we have no idea with chipset they are going to use, but they want to keep the cost of the system down so whatever it is very unlikely to be bleeding edge so if they use chipset that comes out this year the next gen ain't starting anytime soon.

Also remember the launch timing relies upon games being finished and more games being closed to finished. Now presuming launch games would be MK9 and 3D Mario they have had plenty of time to make those so I wouldn't be surprised if they are close to being ready with those, but they need plenty more first party and third party games well into the works before a launch makes sense.

Also they have plenty of sales levers to pull with Switch since they are 6 years in and haven't pulled any yet other than new models. They could do hardware price cuts, software price cuts, and who knows maybe even a late lifecycle new model like I'm pretty sure the New 2DS came out super late in 3DS's lifecycle like didn't it even come out after the Switch?

Sales are indeed definitely slowing down now and 2023 will be the first year since 2018 that doesn't have amazing sales for Switch. But software is the lifeblood of the gaming industry and Nintendo sells TONS of software so HW slowing down doesn't mean we're suddenly gonna see a next gen Switch when they can keep making tons of money from Switch software for a good long while.

There's also that rumor, or well not even a rumor just a guy saying for some reason he thinks Nintendo might have a hard time making next gen backwards compatible with the Switch because I guess he thinks its gonna be a different architecture. If that is even remotely true Nintendo releasing later to either get a stronger chipset to make Switch emulation more easily done (in terms of performance) and having time to make a good emulator for it would make sense since they can just sell tons of software in the meantime and make bank off decent HW and great SW sales.

Not quite. The Switch 1 chipset was indeed a variant of the 2015 released Tegra X1, released 2 years later in 2017, you are right about that. However, the chipset that has leaked for Switch 2 usage is a custom variant of Nvidia's Tegra Orin chipset. Orin is a giant chipset designed for usage in modern car infotainment displays, it was first announced by Nvidia in 2018 and was available to purchase for usage in cars by 2021. The Switch 2 variant of the chip was reportedly ordered by Nintendo that same year, 2021. The Switch 2 variant of Orin is more customized than the Switch 1 variant of Tegra X1 was, it is significantly smaller than the original Orin, which could be as big and as powerful as Nvidia wanted it to be since it would be powered by a car battery and/or alternator, not a small tablet sized battery. In addition to being smaller, the original Orin had CPU cores spread across multiple clusters, but the Switch 2 variant has all 8 CPU cores in a single cluster.

We don't know the exact specifications of the Switch 2 chipset yet, but from what I have been able to gather, the ARM A78 CPU with 8 cores should have about 6x the performance of the ARM A57 4 core CPU in Switch 1. GPU wise things are less certain as we don't know how many GPU cores are in the Switch 2 variant of the Orin chipset. The best guess is that it will fall in somewhere between the 3.36 tflops of the 32GB variant of the original Orin, and the 1.88 tflops of the Orin NX 16 GB variant, most likely on the lower end of that range, closer to the Orin NX. RAM will likely be 10 or 12 GB of LPDDR5, of the 102.4 GB/s variant, compared to 4GB of LPDDR4 at 25.6 GB/s on the original Switch and 4GB of LPDDR4X at 34.1 GB/s on the Switch OLED.

So, while the Switch 1 was technically 2015 tech releasing in 2017, that doesn't paint the full picture because the Maxwell GPU was 2014 tech, and the ARM A57 CPU was only 2013 tech. As for Switch 2, we would be looking at a custom variant of a 2021 chipset containg both a 2020 Ampere GPU and a 2020 ARM A78 CPU releasing in 2024. So technically Switch 2 is slightly more outdated than Switch 1 is,  and it would be even more outdated as a 2025 product rather than a 2024 product.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 08 March 2023