| bonzobanana said: This seems to back up the single Tensor cores and also use of an inferior ARM A78AE CPU cores re-designed to work on Samsung's 10/8Nm fabrication process. This ARM A78C seems like manipulative marketing. Yes you can make the case they are similar but ARM A78C's are designed for a more modern fabrication process and would Nintendo really have paid up for a complete re-design of the ARM A78C to work on such a dated fabrication process cutting back many features to work on 10/8Nm when there are already ARM A78AE cores? What we do know is Geekwan showed the CPU of Switch 2 had 4MB of cache same as ARM A78AE not the 8MB of the ARM A78C? So just by looking at the PCB we know its likely to be the original ARM A78AE cores. The ARM A78AE cores produce about 7-7.5 DMips of performance per Mhz. So half the passmark given below for single and multi results due to the 1Ghz speed as previously stated. The ARM A78AE seems to be a much more power efficient design compared to A78C but lower performance too. My point is surely on such a system you have to factor in the greater demands of DLSS when upscaling and the very low CPU resources of the console. It isn't that much more powerful than the Jaguar cores of the PS4 in fact its about the same as the faster Jaguar cores of the PS4 Pro overall. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=ARM+Cortex-A78AE+8+Core+1984+MHz&id=6298 My point is DLSS upscaling requires more CPU resources compared to native rendering at the lower resolution especially if using the highest quality settings and frame generation. The CPU is much, much weaker than many people are stating. The operating system is devoting lots of resources to gamechat and other features. It's a fantastic portable console just not that powerful overall with huge exaggerated claims about performance. |
Replying to this in a separate post because it is a different topic.
Even if we take your premise as true (that the Switch 2 is using the same AE cores that exist in Orin) we are still seeing about 2.8 times the performance of the PS4's CPU in multi-core and 2.5 times in single-core, using Geekerwan's simulated test where he clocked the 8 AE cores (also on an 8 nm node, btw) in an Orin NX at 1.1 Ghz and 1Ghz and ran Geekbench 6 (which no, is not measuring GPU at all. Geekbench's GPU test is a separate benchmark from its CPU test.)
But in reality the Switch 2 does have an A78C with 8-cores on single cluster (confirmed by the leaked SDK.) This gives it an advantage in multi-core over the 2 Cluster x 4 Core 78AE's in the Orin NX. So the benchmark above is probably a slight (5-10%) under-estimate for multi-core performance. .
You can also see that the A78AE and A78C are different cores, even if the exact same size. So it's not just a binned T234.
Like is typical with consoles, cache probably was "reduced" (remember 8MB L3 is the maximum ("up to') for A78C, not the full range it can come with, which is Optional 512KB - 8MB) to make space on the die.
By the way, ARM designs their cores to work on multiple different fabs. You can see this in this image from the Geekerwan video.
The Dimensity 8200 has 4 A78 (no-suffix) cores and is on TSMC 4nm while the Snapdragon 888 has 3 A78 cores and is on Samsung 5nm.
In the image above we see SF 3nm-5nm, TSMC 4nm-6nm all using the same A78 (no-suffix) cores.
A78AE itself comes in a Samsung 5nm variant (Auto v920) in certain Audi cars and a Samsung 8nm in the Jetson Orin devices.
Video from Kurnal where you can find a lot of this information.
13:07 is where the core-cluster ratio is discussed.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 04 June 2025
