If that was the case, Series S should have been outselling PS5 when in fact its sales started decreasing as soon as Sony managed to put hardware in store 

You don't need to buy 3 copies for 400 USD day one anyways

The most price sensitive customers only buy console later on the console cicle of life. The ones who buy early are willing to pay more.

Maybe if the console is more expensive you will be less tempted to buy multiple copies, but keep in mind most households don't own multiple consoles and this is a niche that can be mitigated by temporary discounts, bundles and less expensive revisions during the generation. You can easily get the 450 USD for yourself day one and buy 350 versions to your kids in some Christmas bundles along with some Mario or Pokemon on the third, forth or fifth year of the console's life 

I'm thinking 399 is the floor, and that is with an LCD screen. I don't mind that, actually, if this money brings better specs and then later they come with another OLED edition for 449.

I'm guessing around £350 or so.

Yeah because the switch and ps5 is the same demographic.  Lol.  

The hybrid design makes owning more than 1 per household reasonable....  and since my kids own their console they are buying more software.  I would assume Nintendo understands this.

And if power matters and not price...  I assume the Steam Deck is outselling the Switch, right?  

Considering more than half of PS5 owners are also Switch owners, yes, they are the same demographic at least partially.  

https://www.google.com/amp/s/english.jagran.com/lite/technology/around-half-of-playstation-5-users-also-owns-nintendo-switch-in-us-says-report-10085121

Remember: Early adopters are hard-core gamers and hardware makers fans. This is not mass market. It's a demographic of tec enthusiasts and they are absolutely willing to pay more

And this is all ignoring the big elephant in the room: The mass market is buying OLED in droves for 350 USD and its ancient tec to play PS3-level games of graphical fidelity. I see no reason whatsoever for the same demography turned their back on Nintendo for charging 50 ot even 100 USD for a much stronger hardware 

Agree to disagree.  Nintendo has a break point above $400.  It isn't their market nor their main demographic.  

If power was key than Steam Deck would be competing with the Switch.  It isn't.  

Nintendo's most successful consoles have always been well priced, not high end.

This is being up the memories of those fateful threads bashing the initial announcement of the Switch price ...

So many thought the floor at to be at 249$ for the product to be widely adopted and yet with the right set of games and a dose of good hype, it managed fine at 299$.
Now if we think about what the next little machine could pack up at launch, inflation, etc ... I'd say the floor is in between 349$-399$. People have to absolutely keep in mind that Nintendo wants their system to remain affordable so forget the 499$+ thresholds, these don't make sense.

Well... nVidia will sell the Tegra Orin 16GB, the most likely equivalent chip to drop into the Switch for $599 USD.

The full chip aka... AGX Orin 64GB has 17 billion transistors on a 8nm Samsung process, which is Geforce 3060Ti/3070 die size, which is massive for a mobile chip... But that is not the chip the Switch will get.

Reducing the CPU cores to 2/3rds, cache to 2/3rds, halving the memory bus, halving the GPU, we could see some interesting scaling, the Geforce MX550 for example has a die size of 200mm2 (4.7~ Billion transistors) on a 12nm TSMC process and that is a GPU about as big as what the Tegra the Switch 2 would get.

Where-as the 3050Ti on Samsung 8nm process was also 200mm (8.7~ billion transistors.) and that sold for MSRP of $249 USD.
And 200mm2 is pretty cheap, especially as they are not on a leading-class node like 3/4nm from TSMC.

The Switch Tegra X1 is 118mm2, the revised Mariko was 100mm2.

For all intents I would expect the next chip to be roughly 150-180mm2 at a cost to Nintendo of around $50-$70 per chip... Obviously this is hypothesis and not based on a factual release as we don't yet know which *exact* chip Nintendo is going to use, thus we can only surmise based on what would be cost-effective.

We do know that, even after a year or two, nVidia was counting the Tegra X1 sales in the Switch in terms of "billions", so they were making some coin on what was a previously a low-selling chip.

Considering it's NVidia we're talking about, I guess it's closer to the upper end of your estimation. So I'll go with $70, if not even $80.

edit: Considering that the GPU part is basically half a 3050 (which is the same chip as the larger 3050Ti and 200mm²), but with enhanced IO, I'd say the GPU and IO part will be around 90-110mm². If we consider the Cortex A78AE cores to be similar in size to the Alder Lake e-cores, we'll get to ~120-140mm².

An interesting part to the CPUs is the AE at the end of the description. ARM uses this normally for cores that support multithreading - but the Cortex A78 doesn't. So either NVidia has added multithreading to those cores or it stands for something else entirely in NVidia's case. If they indeed are capable of multithreading then a 6-core CPU part could suffice for Nintendo.

As for the performance, the full fat Orin 64GB has a raw performance pretty similar to that of the PS4 Pro. So I expect the Orin NX 16 GB to be closer to the PS4 in raw performance, (it's about Radeon HD 7790 level) but with all the modernisations since then, Switch 2 would be noticeably more performant than the last-gen console.

It really depends how dense they can make those core clusters. Shared cache and the amount of cache makes all the difference as cache doesn't really scale downwards to smaller fabrication processes very well.

I/O is a hard thing to quantify, the higher your DRAM speed and layout, the more complex it is to build IO, so a GPU tends to have fairly large amounts of I/O due to that fact.

I think 150mm2 is a fine ballpark figure of what is reasonable expected from a handheld mobile chip.

In nVidia's case it's actually a standard Cortex A78, but the AE stands for "Automotive Enhanced".

That means the chip has been tested to operate mission critical components like speed clusters on a cars dash.

Hyperthreading does increase die-size and energy consumption, so it's usually reserved for devices that are less energy sensitive.

6 cores would absolutely be fine, 8 would be preferable, we need to remember that 1-2 CPU cores will be used for the OS/Background tasks leaving less for actual games.

Considering a Geforce 1050Ti can beat a Radeon R9 380, where the R9 380 is already twice as fast as the Playstation 4's Radeon 7850-level GPU... Orin with 1024 Cuda cores and 100GB/s of bandwidth would decimate the Playstation 4... And even the Playstation 4 Pro.

As Orin not only has more CUDA cores than a 1050Ti Pascal, but it's more efficient -and- can clock higher.

Raw numbers isn't what we should ever base hardware performance on, because there has been massive strides in efficiency in the last decade.