The Switch has already had one or two revisions depending on what you call the lite.

Can DLSS tensor cores be added via USB?

"In July 2018, Google announced the Edge TPU.....The product offerings include a single board computer (SBC), a system on module (SoM), a USB accessory, a mini PCI-e card, and an M.2 card."

How is AMD still in the graphics card business if Nvidia can jump 2 gens ahead with AI?

2022 is the absolute earliest Switch 2 should come out, but 2023 would be better.

Switch's audience will not be chomping at the bit for a successor in the next 18 months. It's simply too soon.

There are dangers to premature replacement, you risk both losing millions of potential sales for the system being replaced and misfiring its successor's launch because the audience isn't ready.

The standard existing Switch is pretty much a "premium" model. It's $300 and has a very sizable screen, it's not like it's some rinky dink budget product.

They can make the screen a bit bigger, but really outside of that who's going to care about New 3DS like upgrades. Those type of upgrades don't cause lasting sales bumps, you just get a small temporary spike and then sales then continue to fall. 

The battery life on the new Switches is already back up to being more than enough for any reasonable, you're living some kind of charmed life if you can somehow play 5 hours+ of video games away from home every day. 

They may as well release a model with a larger screen that eats into the fat bezels, and call that the i/New model but realistically you're not going to light the world on fire with something like that late into 2021. 

Nope. There are dependencies in the GPU design that ties the tensor cores to other portions of the chip.

nVidia would need to start from scratch essentially for a "tensor chip". But that won't come cheap... You would be better off grabbing Tegra Xavier and disabling all the junk you don't need... But then you have the bandwidth and latency issue of USB.

Because AMD focuses on price/performance... And AMD can justify the GPU arm due to integration with their CPU products with "APU's". - AMD still doesn't have Ray Tracing yet for example in the PC space... But their GPU's being very compute-centric tends to be lucrative purchase decisions for folding, mining and other activities.

But don't kid yourself, AMD's market share is significantly smaller in the GPU space than they were pre-Graphics Core Next... And mostly because they have been a generation or two behind nVidia in terms of overall efficiency and features.

That doesn't make their products bad though, AMD just plays the pricing game instead.

The flipside to that though is you can lose momentum in a blink of an eye in this business if you are too slow/lackadasical in your transition. 

Nintendo in particular has had this problem really multiple times, going back famously to even their first hardware transition, Hiroshi Yamauchi was so angry with the Genesis going from a joke circa late 1989/1990 to eating a large chunk of the SNES' market share in the West that he publically slammed his own son-in-law (Mr. Arakawa) to the press, lol, which is a huge embarrassment in Japanese business culture. 

You can go very quickly from top of the world to "oh shit, what's happening". It even happened to Sony, they must have thought they'd entered some weird Twilight Zone circa early 2007 whereas 12 months prior they weren't even close to being challenged by anyone. 

2022/2023 wouldn't be a "slow" transition though, that's a normal 5-6 year cycle. 

All they'd need to do is plan the next 3 years well and make sure Switch 2 launches with killer software like Mario Kart 9 and Splatoon 3 in its first year.

More or less I think we're in agreement on that. If you're not good at something you're better off just keeping it simple. 

6 years from Switch 1 launch is a long enough product cycle there's not that much to gain from milking an extra year. It's simple and straight forward. The technology available to Nvidia is not going to be so different anyway in a year, Nintendo will likely opt for 7nm which will be available by 2023 easily, and then save 5nm for a Lite revision. 

Apparently you've never paid attention to Nintendo portables before. Nintendo always releases different versions of their portables. So far we only have one extra version, the Lite. It would be downright shocking if Nintendo didn't release a premium Switch. The standard Switch is not a premium version, because by definition its the standard version! No Nintendo portable has ever been some "rinky dink budget project", and yet with every single system multiple version come out. I don't know why you would expect Nintendo to suddenly change their business model from what has always worked for them, but you will be mistaken if you think they aren't gonna update the Switch in any way.

Also. LOTS of people talk about the large dead space on the sides of the screen. It's weird you say they can't do anything with the screen when that is like literally the most mentioned upgrade people talk about wanting from a new Switch model. Not to mention the fact that they could upgrade the screen itself to a better screen in addition to just making it bigger. There's multiple other upgrades they could do as well: slightly more performant chipset, more storage, more battery, bluetooth, etc.

Did you ever notice how the lots of people buy the Switch Lite. It sold over 5 million in its first 100 days on the market. Just like that, plenty of people would upgrade to a premium version of the Switch, and plenty more people would chose a premium version of the Switch for let's say like $50 or so more than the original. As the Switch gets older people expect to no longer have to pay $300 for it, but I bet most people who makes a decent amount of money would chose a premium version still at $300 over what then becomes the inferior original version at like $250 or whatever. There's a reason this has always been Nintendo's business plan: it works! I doubt you are going to change their mind with your "original Switch is already premium" argument.

Thanks Pem. Sounds like they've fallen way behind since the days of the HD4870 if Nvidia can cheat their way to 4K and double the FPS with AI.

Does that mean Sony/MS's next consoles can't do ray tracing and AI-magic or do they use their own tech for that stuff? It sounds like Nvidia is who you'd choose to make your GPU unless you want to mine dogecoin.