How Will be Switch 2 Performance Wise?

[sc94597]

bonzobanana said:

sc94597 said:

I think you're mixing up the A78AE with the A78C here. The A78C is the SOC that aims to maximize performance on consumer devices (2-in-1 ARM Windows laptops, handheld gaming pcs, and tablets mostly.)  The main purpose isn't to be "more secure" the main purpose is to be a core-dense consumer SoC for chips that have a higher power-envelope than most smartphones. 

Here are the ARM suffix meanings: 

A - Application/General Purposed basic general-purposed cores that are efficiency minded

X - Application/General Purposed aimed for higher performing, especially single-threaded, workloads. Exclusive to certain CXC partners. 

C - Application General Purposed Compute/Core-dense customized for relatively high-performing (compared to smartphone) battery-efficient tablets and laptops 

AE - Automotive Enhanced customized for automotive edge-compute

R - Real-time aimed for deterministic edge-compute

M - Microcontroller aimed for low-powered embedded devices

The major difference between the A78AE and A78C is that an 8-core A78AE SoC has two clusters of 4-cores whereas the A78C has one cluster for all 8 cores. This means the A78C should have moderately better multi-threaded performance than the A78AE, for a given frequency/power-profile because the AE needs an interconnect between the two clusters to access each other's cache.

As for the real-world CPU performance, it should have a healthy advantage over the 8th Generation console's CPUs (which were abysmally weak even upon release), while being limiting compared to what exists in the 9th Generation consoles and even Steam Deck. How that actually manifests in games remains to be seen. A lot of CPU compute can be offloaded to the GPU these days, as GPGPU API's (especially Nvidia's) are much more mature than in say -- 2013. 

Sources:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-looks-to-laptops-cortex-a78c-processor-for-pcs-announced

The Arm Cortex-A78C is built on the foundation of the Cortex-A78 for smartphones and tablets, but is customized to offer the performance required for workloads that are run on notebooks and other types of personal computers. Arm says that Cortex-A78C-powered laptops will offer all-day battery life, but will also be capable of running demanding applications, such as professional productivity suites as well as games.

I'm not confusing them as such. I'm looking for similar chips in the series that do have benchmark results which should give similar results per mhz for the same number of cores based on the same CPU architecture. Lets not forget the reduced cache memory and the fact the Switch 2 has an incredibly low amount of power available when portable. It allows a maximum of 10W per hour with a minimum 2 hour runtime. The whole SOC has 4-6W to use per hour and is on a dated power hungry Samsung 10/8Nm fabrication process. I don't see the point of comparing the Switch 2 with other devices that have much higher battery resources. It is run at almost the same speed in portable mode vs docked. I've not seen anything that says the A78C performs better and its clear the implementation on Switch 2 is cut down with reduced cache and a much older implementation that goes back to 2020/2021 than some of the later A78 based chips.

Comparing an A78C cluster to a 2-cluster A78AE is like comparing an i7 4790 to an i5 4690. Both are "8-core" chips in a similar sense to how in the latter comparison  both are "4-core" chips. But there is a significant difference between having 2 x 4-core clusters and having 1 x 8 core clusters, just like there is a difference between having a 4 core chip with hyper-threading and one without. 

The comparison you are doing is only valid for guessing relative single core performance, which should be similar for an A78AE and A78C. 

Your power argument doesn't make sense. These are SoCs designed for low power systems in the same consumption range as a Switch 2. (The think-pads with A78C cores have TDPs of about 7W, and peak at 20W when plugged in.) Now the Switch 2's CPU is going to be under-clocked compared to them,  because it has a heftier GPU than they do also competing for power resources. 

Yes, the Switch 2 has reduced L3 cache compared to the maximum the A78C allows, but that isnt reduced compared to an A78AE which also only has a max of 4MB.

The A78C IS the "later" A78 core. It was announced and released a few months after the others (September vs. November of the same year.)

ARM's November 2020 announcement of the cores where they emphasize how the homogenous octacore layout improves multi-core performance can be found in the link below.

https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architectures-and-processors-blog/posts/arm-cortex-a78c

"The newest member, Cortex-A78C, builds on the success of these designs with the latest architecture updates for enhanced compute performance, scalability, and security.

...

Cortex-A78C enables more homogeneous multi big core computing, with support for up to 8 big CPU core clusters. The octacore (up to 8 big CPU cores) configurations lead to more scalable multi-threaded performance improvements when compared to Cortex-A78

"

Last edited by sc94597 - on 31 May 2025