Geekerwan got a Switch 2 motherboard early and did a full analysis

[Pemalite]

haxxiy said:

Pemalite said:

Samsungs 8nm is literally based on their 10nm process. - The claim the Switch 2's SoC is "close to 10nm" is thus a laughable statement, because Samsung 8nm is not 8nm geometrically, it's a refined 10nm process, advertising at it's finest.
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1443/vlsi-2018-samsungs-8nm-8lpp-a-10nm-extension/

Nothing here is really new information, we already knew it was a die-harvested Orin part.

The Synthetic benchmarks are not representative of real-world performance.

Samsung's 8LPP/LPU process has a tighter gate pitch, different contacts, and different track and cell heights. It's an extension of 10LPE/LPU but it's not like they slapped a new name into the same old thing.

Granted, the custom 8N process Nvidia used for consumer Ampere already lacked some of the features of Samsung's "8nm" node, but the Switch 2's SoC (which is not a die-harvested Orin, by the way...) even more so.

That is essentially how all these "updated" nodes work. Even in the same "Process family". I.E. 7nm vs 7nm+ at TSMC has a 1.2x improvement in density for the  transistors.
There are normally changes to pitches, contacts, cell heights and more to fit various targets like frequency, leakage and so forth.
https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-bytes/posts/tsmc-oip-17

The Switch 2 is likely the exact same chip as the Tegra Orin NX 16GB - Because there needs to be a few redundant CUDA cores for yield purposes as the Switch 2 SoC is over 200mm2.
128 CUDA cores is an SM, so having 2x SM's in "reserve" wouldn't be a stretch.