It'll make backwards compatibility harder and moderately more costly, but it won't kill it.

Middle-ware (including emulators and translation layers) are much more well-developed these days than they were even ten years ago. To the point where you have open-source teams of amateurs making excellent emulators in relatively short periods of time. Microsoft and Sony are capable of hiring competent staff who are familiar with x86 -> ARM translation to build emulators or translation layers that work well and are fast at a minimal cost. 

Microsoft, in particular, needs to have some sort of translation layer for the ARM-based PC's they are pushing now while we are in this x86 -> ARM limbo era, and I'd be surprised if Game Pass for PC didn't have an x86-ARM translation tool (akin to Apple's Game Porting Tool) in 4-5 years. ARM (and probably eventually RISC V in the following decades) are most likely the future of most consumer CPU's. 

Cool.  Thanks my friend.  I appreciate the information.  Makes sense.  

You have 30 TB data on your Xbox hard drives?

My 1 TB SSD is almost full, but I could uninstall a lot which I prefer to play on PC.
My 5 TB HDD for legacy stuff (Xbox 360 and Xbox One games) is only 70% full.

Most people don't even have all their games downloaded nowadays, it will fill up all the storage on a PS5/XB quickly too, I just delete games I haven't played in a while.

That said, using a 1TB SD Card for "cold storage" and even backing up other games you've downloaded onto a PC (so if you do get the urge to play them again you can just transfer to the SD Card rather than spending an hour+ downloading) works fine too.

You want main storage that is fast and large enough to hold any single game plus a little overhead at minimum, Switch 2 will have that.

I can't see why HDR contrast would be a bad thing for a handheld aside from the battery issues but luminosity doesn't need to be the focus, HDR is so much more than that. I suppose as long as they have an OLED screen, that'll do the same job.  

I still think that Matrix Awakens UE5 demo report from Gamescom for Switch 2 was legitimate. It was reported and confirmed by multiple reliable sources, even a reliable XBox leaker in Jez Corden also said he had heard Nintendo was showing off the system behind closed doors at the event.

I've heard nothing come out since that goes against that report, no denial from Nintendo even when they were asked to comment, no denial from anyone there, no "well I was at Gamescom that definitely didn't happen because if it was we would've seen it" type of thing. It seems like Nintendo may have been upset that it leaked also because they didn't go back to Gamescom the following year, maybe has nothing to do with it, or maybe they decided they didn't want to risk more leaks. 

And looking at the demo at look at what we know about a Tegra T239 it also seems like it would be entirely possible. The only reason a 2050 can't run that demo is because it's hard locked to only 4GB of video RAM and the demo requires I believe 6GB minimum. A 3050 laptop GPU can run it.

Digital Foundry is one of the least bias outlets out there.

If you cared to read, I acknowledged that.

Correct. They do.
And going from 12GB of Ram to 16GB of Ram is an irrelevant issue in regards to price, because it's only a few dollars, but the benefits are huge.

I never claimed that an M.2 drive runs hotter or cooler than a SD card running at 100MB/s, but like I alluded to prior, M.2 drives are not drives you throw into your pocket because they are naked PCB's prone to things like static, bending and other forces.

Heat isn't the issue like you originally claimed however.

And "slots" themselves can be passively cooled anyway, which M.2 drives are often happy with.

I never claimed I had an idea on costings outside of the Ram example I outlined earlier.
I literally agreed with you multiple times that we have no idea on actual costs as the hardware has not been released.

But like I argued prior, it also doesn't matter.

I am a consumer... And as a consumer we should ALWAYS demand more and better hardware from these multi-billion dollar companies, to argue otherwise is anti-consumer.

Apple is exclusive to Apple.

Qualcomm however is another story... The issue there though isn't the CPU capability, but the GPU capability, AMD in the mid-range is still in another league in terms of capability.
In saying that... AMD is adopting ARM and rolling out chips based on it, which could be a lucrative option for the next Xbox or Playstation.
https://siliconangle.com/2023/10/23/nvidia-amd-reportedly-developing-arm-based-pc-processors/

But x86 isn't being dropped, far from it. Zen5 and Zen6 are coming which should bring with it tangible improvements to performance per watt.

I would argue Unreal Engines TSR offers the better option currently.

XESS has made massive gains... And FSR is still... Well. FSR.
But these technologies are still in their infancy relatively, give them a few more years and it will look even more interesting.

The idea is to roll it into the pipelines, AMD is already setting itself up with that by going VLIW2 in a ways, again.
Keep in mind that GPU's have already had low-precision floating point and integer support for over a decade at this point, so technically all GPU's can be "A.I" chips.

The other option is to include a small, discreet NPU engine on a graphics chip that doesn't require firing up the rest of the GPU to activate, but still have the real A.I hardware baked into the pipelines.

I would rather not go down that path as I don't like the idea of an NPU engine eating into silicon space that could be used for more Ray Tracing or Shader cores, but it's one way to get a handle on the power side of the equation.

It's a good idea to watch the PC space as that is where the innovation is occurring on this front, with A.I being the hot buzz word, Intel and AMD rolling out A.I capabilities in their CPU's, we are in for an interesting few years.

And honestly, I don't think it's going to fizzle out like with the 3D fad, it's being baked into hardware and software at every level.

Potentially yes.

However in Microsoft's case, they have kept everything fairly high-level so the hardware is less relevant, they can use binary translation for compatibility... Which will come at the cost of power and performance, but the improved hardware should make up that difference.

I mean we have had Intel Atom x86 tablets running Android and were able to run ARM compiled software just fine before.

Give or take. Yes.

I have OG Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Xbox Series titles all on the one device, well over 2,000 titles.

Same issue I have on PC and Playstation 5 though, but the Playstation 5 to a lesser extent as I don't have it loaded with PS1, PS2 and PS3 titles.

My Switch Library is probably the smallest, but I still need a larger SD Card, 2tb SD Cards aren't common yet, hopefully they enter the market before Nintendo Switches it's online services off.

I have everything installed and updated, I don't like wasting my time installing/updating games.

Don't ever use an SD card for cold storage, it uses NAND which is prone to bit-flipping and thus can lose it's data.

I tested the animated main menu of Ori 2 on my Steam Deck OLED with various settings.

HDR off, (1280x800, 60 fps/Hz, graphics: high, no dynamic resolution):

• minimal display brightness: 11.9 watts (looks better than HDR on with minimal brightness)
• half display brightness: 12.1 watts
• full display brightness: 12.4 watts (up to 600 nits)

HDR on, (1280x800, 60 fps/Hz, graphics: high, no dynamic resolution):

• minimal display brightness: 12.5 watts
• half display brightness: 12.7 watts (looks much better than HDR off with full brightness)
• full display brightness: 13.3 watts (up to 1000 nits)

HDR off, (1280x800, 90 fps/Hz, graphics: high, no dynamic resolution):

• minimal display brightness: 17.5 watts (looks better than HDR on with minimal brightness)
• half display brightness: 17.7 watts
• full display brightness: 18.0 watts (up to 600 nits)

HDR on, (1280x800, 90 fps/Hz, graphics: high, no dynamic resolution):

• minimal display brightness: 20.1 watts
• half display brightness: 20.3 watts (looks much better than HDR off with full brightness)
• full display brightness: 20.8 watts (up to 1000 nits)

HDR off, (1280x800, 45 fps / 90 Hz, graphics: high, no dynamic resolution):

• minimal display brightness: 10.0 watts (looks better than HDR on with minimal brightness)
• half display brightness:  10.1 watts
• full display brightness: 10.5 watts (up to 600 nits)

HDR on, (1280x800, 45 fps / 90 Hz, graphics: high, no dynamic resolution):

• minimal display brightness: 10.5 watts
• half display brightness: 10.7 watts (looks much better than HDR off with full brightness)
• full display brightness: 11.2 watts (up to 1000 nits)

So in the 10 - 13 watts tests, HDR only adds 0.5 - 0.9 watts, depending on the display brightness.
In the results of 17 watts and above, HDR adds 2.6 - 2.8 watts... that probably includes the higher fan speed for cooling.

Then you just re-download the game if your SD Card has an issue, it's not that big of a deal. You should be able to keep your save files on the main storage. I've used SD Cards with the Switch and even prior to that for years and have never had a problem. This isn't just an issue for Switch 2, for PS5/XBox most people are already not keeping all their games actually downloaded all at once on their internal storage. 

It's simply the reality of an industry that's going all digital, you keep the games you play most on board, delete stuff you don't play as much in the moment, if you want to revisit those games you can always put it on cold storage or back up or redownload it. 

The important thing for Switch 2 is the main storage is large enough to handle any single kind of game, that way the publisher can port to the system and be assured a player if they really want to can play the digital only version of the game without needing an add-on SD Card or whatever. 

I have all my games installed on all my various hardware devices. I am not one for deleting, moving and re-downloading. That is archaic.

Speaking of which, the S2 needs real wifi. I hate how slow the switch is with download speeds. It has ways been a fraction of what all my other devices achieve.  

S2 also needs better sound chips. Surround on the switch is very meh.

So hopefully Nintendo addresses a few additional things with the S2.