It's not that I want it to be underpowered, it's that you want it not to be underpowered.

Anyone with a general knowledge of graphics technology could have told you from the moment Switch's form factor was revealed that it was never going to be on par with Xbox One in terms of power.

To be honest and I've said it before the Nintendo of the 90s died with the GameCube.

When that system was not a success after following up the dissapointing N64 for Nintendo, I think the company radically shifted.

We just didn't want to notice it or hand waved it away thinking eventually Nintendo would "come back" to the hardware they used to make.

It was never happening. Too many dumb mistakes made in the past eventually effectively buried their home console business.

They have no choice now but to merge what's left of that division (which is basically nothing -- 14 million Wii U owners) into the much more popular portable side and hope that it can hold serve.

The winding road of failure that got us to this point though ... that began really probably 20+ years ago. Nintendo never should have allowed Sony to make the initial Playstation, they never should've allowed the N64 to ship without a CD-drive, they never should have taken Microsoft so lightly, etc. etc. etc. Every one of those missteps was like stab through a vital organ of their console business, and eventually enough of those just caused it to collapse, the last one being betting the entire farm on casuals as your "new" audience but getting hung out to dry by them. 

Switch is a system that has to be what it is, because Nintendo simply backed themselves into a corner and had no other options.

Of course I want it not to be underpowered, but at the same time that doesn't create an inherent bias. Stop trying to us the "i'm completely neutral guys" position to completely back up stoogyness.

I mean i'm not about to get into a fight about graphical knowledge, I think I have a better idea of it than the general consumer, but you could be more knowedgeable, who knows. I never said I expected it to be near Xbox One though, I said other people did. Quite frankily, with this leaked information, there are multiple routes Nintendo could and should have taken to make it more power heavy. I don't think there's any arguing that. Even with the similarities between the newest Maxwell and Pascal, there's no doubt using a Pascal would have been slightly better at least. I think the amount of underclocking might be taken a bit too far, too. You have a cooling system, use it more affectively. These small changes add up. It's like the people who think there isn't a difference between an intel i7 and an intel i7 k besides the ability to overclock. Believe it or not, there's small differences in just about any model that add up. 

Yes, they could have made it more powerful than this if they'd wanted. But that's not who Nintendo are, not anymore. Their commitment to powerful hardware died with the Gamecube. Since then, every system they've made has opted for low powered hardware. Switch is simply the continuation of the same trend.

That's probably their mindset yes but I think they probably went to far with it. But I agree they probably had battery life in mind a lot. I'd rather have a shorter battery though personally.

If you were buying a Switch because of power than there are bigger issues there. Want power go buy a PC. If you want to play Nintendos greatest games than pick this up. Im getting one and i couldnt care less of the power. Aslong as its not a step backwards.

I think pretty much the last hope is that they make a home console variant that features a regular clocked Tegra X1 and not gimped hardware. Its a long shot but the way it is now is pretty sad.

That's not gonna happen, i'm afraid. You think Nintendo is going to patch up games later on like with the PS4 Pro. That way they are recreating their problem of supporting two consoles at once.

It is. Because if the Switch cannot handle the same level of shader complexity... Or require the games lighting engine to be completely rebuilt, then chances are it will not receive a Port. - It won't be worth it.
There are already edge-cases where nVidia's hardware tanks compared to Graphics Core Next such as Async Compute, which all forward-built games will be built with in mind.

The fact is, the Switch already has less DRAM than the Next Gen Twins, less geometric capability, bandwidth, CPU time, ROPS+TMU's etc' that is already going to impact things even with a full clocked Tegra, when you have 40% of that performance in total? Ouch.

Having a slower CPU means less and simpler A.I characters on-screen and less people able to play a single Multiplayer match and simpler Physics.

There is a baseline of "Good Enough" for what developers are capable of. - Whether the switch can meet that remains to be seen, whilst it is in portable mode? Highly unlikely... And that is damn real shame.

The only way for the Switch to attract Multiplatforms now is if it sells like hotcakes and makes it financially viable for developers.

Need to know how the Switch interfaces with the Dock before I can truly answer that.

If the Switch interfaces with the dock via only USB, then having a Dock with a second Tegra Chip is *never* going to happen.
If it has a propriety connection over something like PCI-E, then it is entirely possible.

Two Tegra chips working together would still fall short of the Xbox One though. There is inherent inefficient scaling (I.E. Not 2x) when running things in SLI and the Xbox One's Graphics Core Next architecture is well suited to more modern game engines that use an abundant amount of Direct X 12 and Vulkan features like Async Compute.

Plus, you would still only have 4Gb of Ram, the Frame buffer also needs to be duplicated for each chip, so even if the Dock had it's own 4Gb pool, you can't add all that to the Handhelds memory pool.

Two Tegras working together though would get "Close enough" to the Xbox One that it is pretty much irrellevent, it would be less of a difference than the Xbox One and Playstation 4.

It is Digital Foundry. They are one of the most credible sources of information in regards to technology on the Internet, next to Anandtech.

You are right. The laws of thermodynamics does apply. To a point.
Aka. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed only transferred or transformed.
But what happens if you take wasted energy that is normally transformed into heat and recycle it via a resonent clock mesh? You reduce power consumption.

The energy the SoC consumes has to go somewhere, a large portion is transformed into wasted heat, thus SoC designers take various approaches to reduce power consumption and increase performance... Like a focus on FP16 performance, Power Gating, Big.Little core configurations, using more energy efficient but lower clocking transisters... You name it.
Big power hungry chips likes what the Xbox One and Playstation 4 use have less of a focus on power consumption, there simply isn't a need for it.

However, Tegra is a mobile-centric chip. It is a different microarchitecture, has different design goals and different power and leakage characteristics than large Graphics Core Next chips.
The Xbox One's GPU capabilities are already almost a half decade old. - Fabrication and chip design has come a long way since then, nVidia has leveraged what it learned with earlier Tegra designs and came up with Maxwell... And then farther refined that with Pascal.
The end result is a massive advantage in nVidia's favour in regards to performance per watt.

Next year the Volta powered Tegra should drop, doubling the performance of the Pascal based Tegra. - Combined with architectural improvements, it should be about an Xbox One in terms of GPU capability, if not better depending on clock rate, still built at 16nm Finfet as well.

The Switch is competing with all gaming platforms. iOS, Android, Windows, Xbox, Playstation. All of them. It is meant to blur the lines between platforms by taking a hybrid approach.

There are much more powerful ARM SoC's in iOS and Android devices these days than a Tegra running at 40% of it's nominal clock rate.

ARM BiFrost, Adreno 530 (Maybe)+540 (Without a doubt), A10 Fusion, are all faster than the GPU in the switch at any of it's clock rates.

Those are chips that will go into Phones and Tablets perfectly fine.

I would even confidently say that the Intel Atom x7 z8700 will beat the Switch not only in CPU tasks, but GPU as well with such low clock rates.

What is wrong with wanting both Nintendo and Graphics?

Graphics can help make a games world come to life, bolster immersiveness so you forget about the real world.
Remember when "Physics" started to gain traction? It made a game like Portal possible... And that was only possible because of increases in CPU capability to do the appropriate calculations.

Remember Battlefield 3? It was much more enjoyable on PC than Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, because the PC could afford to have more people running around and playing in a multiplayer match. It's hardware wasn't limited.

They already have to.
Mobile and Docked are two different performance levels.

I'm hoping for a Switch without the screen, battery and detachable controllers one day for a super cheap $99 or lower price, which runs at the full docked clock rate, then load it up with a ton of older games.

You do get better performance per watt, yeah, but at the end of the day, Xbox One S can consume more than 70 watts when running a game, while a portable will have to make do with about a tenth of that in order to have decent battery life while not only powering the CPU/GPU/RAM, but also the screen.