Predict the price for Switch 2

[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

It's about what I expect, too.

Does anybody have an idea how much the Tegra Orin NX (the most likely choice for a Switch 2) would cost to Nintendo? Having that price would give us a good idea what the final price tag could be, as the other components are more or less a known quantity.

Well... nVidia will sell the Tegra Orin 16GB, the most likely equivalent chip to drop into the Switch for $599 USD.

The full chip aka... AGX Orin 64GB has 17 billion transistors on a 8nm Samsung process, which is Geforce 3060Ti/3070 die size, which is massive for a mobile chip... But that is not the chip the Switch will get.

Reducing the CPU cores to 2/3rds, cache to 2/3rds, halving the memory bus, halving the GPU, we could see some interesting scaling, the Geforce MX550 for example has a die size of 200mm2 (4.7~ Billion transistors) on a 12nm TSMC process and that is a GPU about as big as what the Tegra the Switch 2 would get.

Where-as the 3050Ti on Samsung 8nm process was also 200mm (8.7~ billion transistors.) and that sold for MSRP of $249 USD.
And 200mm2 is pretty cheap, especially as they are not on a leading-class node like 3/4nm from TSMC.

The Switch Tegra X1 is 118mm2, the revised Mariko was 100mm2.

For all intents I would expect the next chip to be roughly 150-180mm2 at a cost to Nintendo of around $50-$70 per chip... Obviously this is hypothesis and not based on a factual release as we don't yet know which *exact* chip Nintendo is going to use, thus we can only surmise based on what would be cost-effective.

We do know that, even after a year or two, nVidia was counting the Tegra X1 sales in the Switch in terms of "billions", so they were making some coin on what was a previously a low-selling chip.

Considering it's NVidia we're talking about, I guess it's closer to the upper end of your estimation. So I'll go with $70, if not even $80.

edit: Considering that the GPU part is basically half a 3050 (which is the same chip as the larger 3050Ti and 200mm²), but with enhanced IO, I'd say the GPU and IO part will be around 90-110mm². If we consider the Cortex A78AE cores to be similar in size to the Alder Lake e-cores, we'll get to ~120-140mm².

An interesting part to the CPUs is the AE at the end of the description. ARM uses this normally for cores that support multithreading - but the Cortex A78 doesn't. So either NVidia has added multithreading to those cores or it stands for something else entirely in NVidia's case. If they indeed are capable of multithreading then a 6-core CPU part could suffice for Nintendo.

As for the performance, the full fat Orin 64GB has a raw performance pretty similar to that of the PS4 Pro. So I expect the Orin NX 16 GB to be closer to the PS4 in raw performance, (it's about Radeon HD 7790 level) but with all the modernisations since then, Switch 2 would be noticeably more performant than the last-gen console.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 22 August 2023