The leaks here indicate a system that is designed with current gen ports in mind.

You don't need LPDDR5X and higher bandwidth if you just want PS4-tier graphics and nothing better than that. The ROG Ally can run PS4 tier games with ease with regular ol' LPDDR5. 

256GB UFS 3.1 is also overkill if the only intention Nintendo has here is their own games and some PS4 tier ports ... 256GB is something you would want if you want to assure developers that basically even the largest modern gen games (150GB on the high end) will be able to be downloaded to every Switch 2 unit and there still be an overhead beyond that. They could have gone with 128GB only if they just wanted a PS4 tier machine. As a developer, 256GB tells me that every Switch 2 system will have enough storage space for a port if I choose to make it (it'll just be up to the user to clear their fridge, but every system out of the box even with no SD Card has enough storage that any user will be able to download and play even the largest sized games), if they had gone with cheaper 128GB, it would be dicier as there already are games that are larger than 128GB like Call of Duty. 

A fan in the dock is also interesting, not enough people are discussing that, but that's more significant than I think a lot of people realize.

These choices also seem to indicate a company that is cognizant of releasing a decent piece of kit and not just farting out the cheapest piece of minimum effort crap they could. 8GB LPDDR5, 128GB internal UFS 2.0 would be good enough if you just want a portable PS4, no need for a fan in the dock either, I don't see why they are going for these higher end choices. I think they want several PS5/XSX games notably Monster Hunter 6 (Wilds) at the top of that list this time around and they have made design choices that will accommodate games like that more easily. 

It's not as much of a market ploy (as in, an unreachable boost clock) as much as it is how RDNA3, Ampere, and Ada work. All these architectures have doubled FP32 instructions per INT32 inside their GPU cores but that affords little benefit in real-life workloads and hence isn't relevant for gaming.

That's the reason a lot of people are going to be bamboozled when they see a 36 TF PS5 Pro or a 4 TF docked Switch 2 thinking they are thrice as fast as a Series X or equal to a Series S... when they aren't.

The gap between a Series S and a Switch 2 is going to be considerably lower than the gap between a Switch 1 and XBox One though I think. 

If Nintendo was just happy releasing a "now you have Mario and friends but in PS4 graphics" I mean there's an awful lot of puzzling, expensive design choices being made here. 

You don't need a 12SM Nvidia chip for that, 8SM or probably even 4SM would cover that. 

You don't need LPDDR5X RAM and 30%+ more bandwidth of just LPDDR5 that's in devices like ROG Ally that can run games like Alan Wake 2 and more. 

Even UFS 3.1 ... I mean is that bleeding edge? No, but it's pretty fucking fast all the same, that's still being used in $1000+ flagship phones and 256GB is basically the amount you would want if you want to accomodate any kind of modern gen game and still have room left over on the base device in any kind of scenario. 

A fan inside the dock ... why would you want that if you don't care that much about performance?

Even "4 teraflops" if that's what we're getting here, 4 teraflops for a system that's going to be heavily likely tied to DLSS and utilizing very low rendering resolutions ... that's an awful lot of horsepower if all you want is PS4 tier Super Mario games. 

It does seem to me like they do want more 3rd party content on the next system or they just have conveniently by coincidence made a system that checks a lot of the "well what do you need to just run this game at a native res of 540p DLSS undocked and 720p docked?" boxes. Well the Series S runs all/most current gen games with just 8GB, so 12GB would give you a decent overhead on the "how much RAM is really needed?" question. Bandwidth your choices for a device that has to be portable obviously are going to be different but if you're more interested in current gen ports, you would want LPDDR5X over LPDDR5, the extra bandwidth is important. 

So what do we think launch titles will be? I am guessing Mario Kart 9 with a 3D Mario a few months later. I am also expecting/thinking a 1440p/60fps Breath and Tears, question is if that will be upscaled via BC or require re-buying the entire games. Knowing Nintendo it will be a re-buy.

I personally don't think this is going to be $399.99, lets just look at what most people agree is the specs at the moment

8 core ARM A78C CPU
1536 CUDA cores/12 SMs Nvidia GPU (doesn't matter what you clock these at, you still have to pay the same for that many CUDA cores)
12GB LPDDR5X RAM (120GB/sec)
256GB internal storage (UFS 3.1)
Larger 7.9 inch Sharp/Innolux 1080p LCD display (larger than Steam Deck or ROG Ally).
More complex dock with an actual fan inside of it

For $399.99 feels like a pretty big stretch to me. That's a freaking *lot* for only $50 more than a Switch OLED. That looks like a $449.99 piece of hardware and even that might be pushing it.

Nintendo didn't use cheap/bottom of the barrel components here, there is some hefty tech here, is it absolute bleeding edge, no, but this is not dirt cheap stuff either at all. 256GB UFS 3.1 storage + 12GB LPDDR5X RAM in the Google Pixel 8 Pro is a $1050 US phone, now yada yada yada phones have other tech but that phone also has a much smaller screen, no Joycons, and no dock to factor in also.

If they can sell this for $399.99 at a profit, more power to them, but I'm skeptical. 

If this is true, Nintendo has actually surpassed my expectations for once, by giving it more RAM than Series S (which will help with porting) and by giving it reasonably fast storage (UFS 3.1 is a pretty huge upgrade over the internal storage in Switch 1, I think Switch 1 storage was like 160 MB/s, UFS 3.1 is 2100 MB/s in reads and 1200 MB/s in writes I believe).

Yep, seems plausible they looked at the Series S and said "OK well this is the baseline for this generation of games, we'll go with that and add 2GB on top to give some room to stretch". Seems very reasonable, probably overkill for Nintendo's own games if anything. 

UFS 3.1 is a monstrous upgrade over the Switch 1 and PS4 era systems too and fast enough to handle anything from the PS5/XSX, as you said 2100MB/sec read speed versus 160MB/sec is night and day. 

That's true, although we didn't have comparable hardware designed to be cheap in the past generation.

If it wasn't for the Series S the gap between the Switch 2 and the current gen would probably have been bigger, not smaller than in the past generation. As it stands, though, Nintendo might be in luck, third-party support-wise speaking.

I don't know if it's luck so much as it looks to me like they have specifically designed a machine that simply can handle modern ports or at least that was of greater consideration in the design process this time around. 

Consider even against the PS5, 448GB/sec bandwidth versus the Switch 2 having 120GB/sec is only about a 3.65x gap. The Switch 1 versus PS4 (I'll leave the XBox One out because it used a large embedded RAM buffer which kinda makes it hard to compare directly) was 25.6GB/sec versus 176GB/sec ... that was like a 7x gap in memory bandwidth (huge difference), on top of that you also then factor in the Switch 2 is probably going to be rendering at far, far lower resolutions than the PS5 does because of DLSS.

As I've said I have some serious doubts this is going to be as cheap as $399.99, there's a lot of component/chip choices here that are completely against the idea of the lowest possible cost. 

Like a PS5 game that's rendering 1440p natively lets say ... sure it has about 3.65x the bandwidth, but it would also have to render more than 3.65x the pixels per frame as a Switch 2 version of the same game that's running at say 540p undocked (DLSS up to 720p) and 720p docked (DLSS up to 1440p). That has to be part of the equation too, yes, the PS5 has more bandwidth obviously but it also has to render a metric shit ton of more pixels per frame. 

They definitely didn't have to choose 120GB/sec RAM (or a GPU that probably requires that much bandwidth) just to have Mario and Pikachu and friends in PS4 quality even at 1440p (which you could just DLSS up from 720p or 900p) ... it just seems to me like a lot of hardware choices here that are way overkill if that was all Nintendo wanted/needed. 

The LPDDR4 would have had significantly lower latency and the Maxwell GPU had features such as delta color compression that the PS4 lacked, however, so I doubt it was a major bottleneck.

Besides, even when all other factors are equal, bandwidth doesn't need to scale linearly. The 4090 does just fine with twice the bandwidth of a PS5 despite being 4 times faster, for instance.

I expect DLSS on the Switch 2 to be as common as PSSR and FSR will be in the upcoming years (unless it's mandated), so that evens out.