It's interesting too how Nintendo is taking a lot of marketing cues from Sony. I mean seeing a Nintendo commercial on ESPN in the past, ok, but Nintendo sponsoring segments on ESPN directly ... like that's something Playstation or XBox would do, not really Nintendo. Times have changed for sure, I don't think this type of sponsorship below ever happened under the Wii or DS brands: 

The Iwata era (2003-2015 roughly) is basically over, I said it many times, this is going to be a different style of Nintendo. Sure some things remain the same but using things "well Nintendo designed the Wii and DS this way, so that will hold true for Switch 2 also!" was stupid. You have a completely different board of directors, a completely new head of hardware development, a new president who's like 25 years younger, and you already have precedent in the Yamauchi era was very different from the Iwata one, so why would you assume this next era would be exactly the same as the past one. Miyamoto these days is basically more involved in movies and theme parks and that in itself is a crazy change from 10-20 years ago, who woulda thought "I don't want cinematics in my games" Miyamoto would be working on huge budget Hollywood blockbuster films and attractions, lol.

You have Nintendo embracing more premium pricing as well, shunning price cuts, pushing features like 4K resolution and 120 FPS VRR in their official marketing, etc. etc. as well. Again, this ain't 2007 anymore, that's a life time ago in tech cycles now. 

And yes, I do think this time around you will see a Switch 2 Pro as well. It will just logically further features like higher resolution DLSS and more usage of 40/60/120 FPS modes that they're already pushing on the Switch 2. 

It is a false statement, it's not a "Hand me down". - Nintendo made a purchase that was disconnected from the Shield lineup.

As for the CPU efficiency cores being disabled, that was NOT a Nintendo thing, that was an nVidia thing.
Because devices like the Pixel C also had the ARM A53 cores disabled as well.

nVidia eventually removed those cores entirely in later revisions of the Tegra X1 SoC's that ended up in Shield devices.

As for T239, it's a cut down T234.
It's literally nothing special, it's literally not a new or unique design.

It's a die-harvested part.

Fabrication is the basic fundamental cornerstone that determines what the design of a chip can be.

Certain fabrication processes have strict die-sizes, voltage limits and frequency curves that need to be strictly adhered to otherwise issues such as electromigration come into play.

You cannot take a Geforce RTX 5090 with it's 92~ Billion transistors and drop it onto a 14nm process node and call it a day, it doesn't work that seamlessly, sacrifices and changes to things like placement of dark silicon, pipelining and more need to be done to reduce things like crosstalk and leakage.

The T239 could exist without Nintendo, it's a Die-harvested part.

You have the T234 as your full blown chip. - nVidia then reduces it down by disabling parts of the chip to meet yields.
In-fact they did it with Orin 32GB which lost 256~ CUDA cores.

And then they did it again with Orin 16GB which was 50% of the CUDA cores.

And then they did it again with Orin 4GB which was 25% of the CUDA cores.

These are all the same chip. The same design.

Nintendo isn't getting a special or unique (Other than being a variant of already designed ORIN chips.) chip here.

There is no secret sauce.

You can take the T234 and edit the firmware to disable CUDA cores to match the T239 chip. - Making it identical.

Tegra is used in a lot of different markets, you just need someone who wants to use a cut down chip and nVidia would oblige, it's not exclusive to Nintendo, it's exclusive to who has a wallet and will pay enough, nVidia holds the rights to the chip and it's technology, not Nintendo.

There is no specific design choices that make it unique other than it being a die-harvested part.

Correct. T234 is not. But it is based on T239.

What specialized accelerators for gaming specific tasks? Got evidence?

NVDLA or "nVidia Deep Learning Accelerator"  is open source and can run on Switch 2 or any Tegra/nVidia powered device, it's up to developers to include it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVDLA

Nvidia's architecture is top of the line, best of the best, even an "off the shelf part" would be fine, but I don't think the T239 is only that. I think they tweaked it hard to make sure if can get good performance without the heat/power consumption issues of the Tegra X1. 

The fact is it is different from Switch 1 in that it was designed for the Switch 2 more or less. The Tegra X1 was not. And Nintendo has expressed that they were not satisfied with the Tegra X1's performance. They wanted higher performance. The fact that they're happier and more satisfied with the Tegra 239 to me suggests it was tailored more to the needs of the Switch 2.

Either that or Nvidia is simply better at making these kinds of chips today, same difference. It's good for the Switch 2 either way. 

Nintendo is fortunate in a lot of ways they got grandfathered into basically a long term relationship with Nvidia when Nvidia was a lot smaller company (circa 2015) and now it just makes sense for both parties to continue on together with Switch 2. But if Nvidia was a company back then that are today (third largest company in the world by market cap after Apple and MS), odds are Nintendo probably would be using some crappier AMD chip instead today. 

Nvidia doesn't really emphasize the Tegra product line any more that much, Nintendo being a vendor and the Switch being a massive success keeps them likely in that pool and lets them take things from their top of the line GPU architectures and bring it into play for Nintendo, but likely if there wasn't a pre-existing relationship with a track record of massive success, Nintendo might have to be paying Nvidia more money to get them to pull resources away just for a game console (small potatoes for Nvidia). 

1. It is "hand me down" in the way I was using the idiom and for the context of the discussion I was having with Bonzobanana. You interpreted that phrase to mean that I was suggesting Nintendo got a bunch of physically existing chips left-over from the Nvidia Shield. I clarified multiple times that the design is what is being "handed ... down" not the physical units and that is precisely what I was intending to mean when I used the idiom. 

2. Okay, who said that fabrication doesn't matter when it comes to design? That was never a point I made. The point being made is that the SOC designers work for Nvidia and are making high salaries on the order of six and seven digits. Any extra work they do designing new bespoke SOCs for a special customer, who is the single purchaser of that SOC, has additional costs. They're nowhere near the costs of designing a new micro-architecture or a SOC family, but these costs are still significant. 

3. It could exist (in some form), but it wouldn't. The point being made isn't that it could exist. The point being made is that it wouldn't exist. That is evidenced by the fact that Nintendo is its only purchaser and is almost certainly involved in the design process of the chipset as that sole purchaser by setting the constraints of what they want the chipset to be able to do. Again, the specific SOCs STILL HAVE DESIGNERS, ENGINEERS, and TESTERS who have to make them fit their target device. These decisions aren't magically made without employees involved. Iterative testing still needs to be done. Project managers and planners still need to be involved. Teams need to come together to do that planning, implementation, and testing. All of that is internal to Nvidia. All of that costs something. 

4. Okay, and how are you going to fit that 455mm² chipset in a Switch 2 sized handheld? What do you cut with meeting your single consumer's (Nintendo's) performance and efficiency goals? Who decides this? Nvidia employees, maybe? Without the different CPU of the T239, is it a T239? Remember the T239 isn't just its GPU, but the whole chipset, including its CPU as well. 

Nvidia could indeed sell the T239 to other customers, but nobody else wants it (as otherwise they would have bought it), and it doesn't change the fact that they are designing the chipset, initially, for a single customer of that chipset with an intended use-case in mind. 

5.

T234 has the NVDLAs built into its SOC (it has two of them vs. one in the cut-down variants) while the T239 doesn't have one at all. This had to be decided by real employees at NVIDIA when designing the T239, not Samsung, not solely Nintendo. 

It's also known that the T239 uses different CPU cores (either A78C or a hierarchy of X1/A78C/A55, depending on which rumor is true vs. exclusively A78AE.) So no you couldn't just cut or under-clock the CPU and have a T239. Orin NX, Orin Nano, etc retain the A78AE cores. 

The addition to the T239 that didn't exist in the T234 (and its cutdown variants) we know of is the file decompression block. 

It isn't even certain that the T234 and T239 were designed by the same team. 

https://wccftech.com/nintendo-switch-2-8nm-soc-ampere-efficiency-goals/#:~:text=Additionally%2C%20the%20T239%20chip%20may,file%20decompression%20block%20required%20for

"Additionally, the T239 chip may have begun development as some sort of offshoot of the much bigger and more power-hungry T234 chip, but the two chips have been designed by different teams, have different CPUs, and the Nintendo Switch 2 chip has some additional features, such as a file decompression block required for fast loading and asset management, so it's not a cut-down version of the chip used in the automotive segment."

There is no game console that doesn't have a "hand me down" chip architecture to some degree. 

AMD and Nvidia will never make a chip expressly only for a freaking peanut margin, low volume (yes, even 150 million units sold in 8 years is nothing special in the broad sense of electronics) game console. 

The PS5 and XBox Series S/X are hand me down chips too. 

That more relevant point for the Switch 2 is how efficient the chip is. Any idiot can put a mobile 4080 GPU into any "mobile" system, there's nothing special about that, it's about what kind of performance can you pull given a tablet sized form factor that has to be portable. 

A Tegra T234 is designed to run off a massive freaking car battery. 

What I think is going to be the fundamental difference between Switch 1 (Tegra X1) and Switch 2 (Tegra T239) is the T239 can handle PS5/XBSS ports more easily than the Tegra X1 could handle PS4/XB1 "impossible ports". We see that already there is a growing list of PS5-XBSS games already announced or stated as coming from reliable leakers. Star Wars Outlaws, AC Shadows, Wild Hearts, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Cyberpunk 2077 w/Liberty City DLC, etc. etc. Nintendo's hardware team has stated they weren't satisified with the Tegra X1 and wished it was more powerful as it couldn't handle all types of games ... it would seem they feel more confident this time that the Tegra T239 can handle more of just about anything thrown at it. 

The point being made, repeatedly, is that the Switch 2, PS5, and Series S/X have specialized R&D for their chipsets. You can't buy another device with their specific combination of hardware (at least upon release, AMD has resold cut-down variants of the 9th Generation Console APUs to consumers.) 

They are what we typically call "semi-custom" which means there is extra R&D by the chipset designer put into them to tailor them to the specific SKU they were to be sold in.  

This was not true of the original Switch. It literally had the same SOC as other devices. 

It's like buying a custom design for a home from an architect and making some modifications in the  home plan, versus buying a traditional blueprint that is the same plan for many homes with no changes. 

For the specific discussion with bonzobanana, it is this distinction that mattered, because in order to say the "Switch is under-clocked compared to say an Nvidia Shield" all else really does need to be equal. Once you have different core counts, or a different CPU-variant the constraints that help determine things like optimal clock rate, and efficiency curves change, even with the same micro-architecture. 

The point wasn't to make a general comparison between the Switch and Switch 2, or whether or not the Switch 2 has a more suitable SOC. It was to illustrate that we don't have the same reference point when it comes to Switch 2 that we did with Switch. The closest thing to it is the T234, but the T234 is a very different chipset designed for a very different purpose, has a different CPU, has different memory and core configurations, has specialized edge-compute hardware, etc. 

The other thing is various South Korean business sources have stated the Tegra T239 is Samsung 5nm ... which would also be a massive difference from the T234 as well. 

I thought the only thing we had pretty much confirmed was the Switch 2 is using a Samsung 8Nm process which is not that great a fabrication process and is less power efficient and has lower transistor density than Intel's 10Nm process which is why they started calling their process 'Intel 7' despite being 10Nm because of other fabricators over-stating their process. When you factor this in and only 5W per hour for the Switch chipset (allowing 5W for the screen per hour) then you have a console surely quite low power relying heavily on DLSS upscaling to punch above its weight.

This is not confirmed yet. The only thing confirmed is that Samsung is the manufacturer, meaning it isn't a TSMC fab. It could be Sammy 8nm or 5nm. People have good arguments for both of them. 

A South Korean business newspaper source that is close to Samsung stated 5nm, so I guess we'll see on that. 

Either that or they have exceptionally tuned the architecture of the chip for increased power efficiency, which also would debunk the "this is just an off the shelf component" line of logic.

The fact is the results we're already seeing from the machine are above a Steam Deck it looks like and comparable to a ROG Ally perhaps? A ROG Ally is a $650 system.

This is nothing at all like the Wii, DS, 3DS, or Wii U that had tech no where comparable to expensive hardware performance of their time like that.