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sc94597 on 17 January 2025
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bonzobanana said:

I feel like if Nintendo have gone for a relatively cheap Samsung 8Nm fabrication process its clear they are looking to get a very good manufacturing price and if the fabrication process is a bit cheaper and slightly inferior technology then the console will create more heat and be more power hungry so to offset that lower clocks seem more logical to me so I'm expecting around 3x power boost for the Switch 2 with about 400-800 Gflops in portable mode and around 1.2-1.6 Teraflops in docked mode. Of course being later technology with clever upscaling it will punch above its weight in graphic performance. I really can't see it offering 3 Teraflops of performance in docked mode. People are always overly optimistic about Nintendo hardware performance but normally within a few months reality starts leaking out. If Nintendo keeps to lower speeds then chip yields are higher and prices are lower and Nintendo makes more profit on the hardware. Nintendo delivers great performance with standard Switch hardware and I feel with 3x the raw power or maybe 4-5x the actual power using more efficient technology is enough to feel like a huge generational leap. I'll be happy to be proved wrong though. I feel the world economy is not in a great state and we are in uncertain times so hardware that can start at a high retail price but drop hugely and still be profitable in a market downturn is probably the wisest path to take.

So 400-600 Gflops would imply clock speeds of 130-195 Mhz if the Switch 2 has a T239. 

Ampere chips idle at about 210 Mhz. The lowest active power-state clock rate of any Ampere chip is the RTX  a2000 at 562Mhz. 

According to the SDK leak from a few days ago the Switch 2 is at 561 Mhz in handheld mode and 1007.25Mhz in docked mode.

That'd align with the a2000 having a 562 Mhz base clock. 

So unless the Switch 2 isn't using a T239, but a smaller chip with fewer cores (very unlikely) flops as low as you're suggesting aren't possible. 400Gflops-600Gflops at single-precision would imply sub-idle frequencies, and nearly half of what the Switch 1 was able to achieve in its lowest handheld mode setting on the Maxwell architecture. GPU's have minimum voltages (and therefore frequencies) that they have to be at to even work properly. 

Last edited by sc94597 - on 17 January 2025