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bonzobanana on 07 May 2025
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haxxiy said:

There's an excellent teardown on YouTube of some Chinese dude who got a Switch 2 motherboard. It looks like a mix of Samsung's 10 nm and the tighter pitch of the improved 8 nm node, surprisingly enough, maybe to optimize its power-performance curve at the lowest end.

The die design is a bit strange since a couple of SMs on the GPU are separated from the others. The design tape-out was in 2021, indicating it might be true that it was originally planned for an earlier release.

Like DF, they also simulate Switch 2 performance with the RTX 2050 downclocked as a proxy. The docked performance is aligned to the GTX 1050 Ti in docked mode and the GTX 750 Ti in handheld mode in the Synthetic tests Steel Nomad Light. It's far from the Xbox Series S, and the closest mobile equivalents, graphics-wise, are Apple's A18 Pro and the M1 in docked mode, and the Steam Deck is a bit better in handheld mode.

I watched that video and it appears to be an inferior fabrication process to Samsung 8Nm with a higher level of 10Nm fabrication within the chip. Also that video seems to be simulating the Switch 2 in portable mode using far higher wattage than a real Switch 2 can use. Again it only has a 20Wh battery (3.7Vx5.2A) with a minimum runtime of 2 hours in portable mode so only gets about 5W on average for the SOC with 5W for the screen per hour. That video seems to show portable mode using far higher wattage than that. I'm sure the docked mode figures are fine but doesn't seem to have calculated for battery capacity and runtime in portable mode.

It does feel like docked mode is right though. Docked mode is about 2 Teraflops but they are claiming more like 1.2 Teraflops for portable mode which seems an impossibility for a 8/10Nm fabrication process and only 5W per hour. I still feel real performance in portable mode is between 600-800Gflops to get to that 2 hours minimum run time. I did claim docked performance before this video would be between 2 and 2.4 Teraflops and it's at the lower end of that expectation not the high end.

Surely using such a fabrication process means they will need to downclock severely to get 2 hours portable runtime?

No one here seems to be addressing the battery issue of the Switch 2 it just gets constantly ignored. If I've got it completely wrong tell me but I'm really curious about this. I would say with games like Cyberpunk dropping to 360p native rendering surely that is something required to get 2 hours out of the Switch 2. Also 5W is the absolute maximum it can use on average, the Switch 2 will need to use far less for games that have longer runtime than 2 hours.

The original Switch used about 4W on average in portable mode and it looks like the Switch 2 is very similar, hardly surprising but people are writing like the Switch 2 can use much more than this in portable mode but how is this powered?