I think if it was Nvidia he would have just said so, Nvidia is not that secretive, Nintendo obviously is though. 

I don't know what any of that means. Is that good?

Secretive in what way specifically ? 

BTW, Nintendo hardly uses cutting edge lithography technology going by recent history. The 3DS's GPU is manufactured at 65nm despite 40nm being available at the time from TSMC and the WII U's GPU was manufactured at 45nm despite 28nm being available from TSMC/Globalfoundries ... 

These guys even lag too in terms of CPU and GPU microarchitectures ... 

Yeah though I suspect this has changed for Nintendo, they simply can't use underpowered hardware anymore, not if they don't have a miracle gimmick to sell with it, and I think Nintendo has swallowed their pride on that account as the U tablet and the 3D screen failed to really drive hardware sales. 

Perhaps they have a deal with AMD/TSMC to cover against some of the early yield issues in exchange AMD/TSMC get the contract for Nintendo's portable line which needs to be compatible with the home line. I could see it. 

That's probably going to be one expensive handheld if your theory is true.

There's absolutely no way in hell Nintendo's making that mistake again.

And what if TSMC's 10nm faces further delay ? What are Nintendo going to do about possibly missing the holiday window ? Is Nintendo willing to outbid Apple in terms of 10nm wafer allocation ? 

You don't NEED to have the same chip designer for compatibility purposes. What you need are compatible tool sets for developers although this may hurt optimizations both way on specific platforms. Nintendo can make a cross-compatible x86/ARM compiler and design a more abstract graphics API like DirectX 12 or Vulkan and be done without having to worry about different hardware too much ... 

Saying it could be Nvidia is a bit of a stretch. It seems like Nintendo. Maybe a Sony product.

Why would Nintendo do it? Should be obvious that Nintendo is trying to leverage their handheld dominance into the console space with united software. Doing so would result in a huge install base and, presumably, widespread 3rd party support.

For the model to work, NX home is going to need to match competitors and NX away is going to have to be able to play the same games. A cutting edge, expensive handheld may be a risk, but it's a necessary one. Especially with cutting edge phones and tablets on the market. Times have changed for Nintendo.

The new smaller process will be useful and welcome also for mid/low-end chips, given the really big yield it offers compared to current tech, moreover it gives big power savings that will benefit not only portables and wireless peripherals, but also home devices, using it home NX could be powerful enough and still use a tiny case without cooling problems and using small and light PSU and coolers, all good points for Ninty, as slim consoles fit its current style, moreover they allow savings on raw materials costs, warehousing and shipping, and they make happy retailers too as they use shelf space better.

I highly doubt Nintendo will go for 10 nm, also all points they will release new hardware this year, maybe MS will go for 10 nm because it looks MS will not release new hardware in near future but end of 2017 looks very possible. But yes, Nintendo could go 10nm for handheld, but again 10nm for handheld at beginning will be more expensive than older nm architecture.