News Nvidia confirms Nintendo Switch 2 SoC's AI, ray tracing features, keeps real specs to itself for now

[Admin]

Nvidia is promising its Nintendo Switch 2 chip offers 10x the peformance of the prior console.

Nvidia confirms Nintendo Switch 2 SoC's AI, ray tracing features, keeps real specs to itself for now : Read more

 

[Notton]

The rumored chip specs:

Chip name: T239 (Tegra/Ampere)
Process: 8nm (Most likely Samsung)

CPU: 8-core Cortex-A78AE at 2.0Ghz
Instruction set: ARMv8.2-A 64-bit
RAM: 12GB LPDDR5X, 120GB/s
GPU: GA10B, 1536 CUDA cores, 2.360 - 2.820 TFlops (FP32?) (Closest consumer counterpart is RTX2050)

The Nintendo Switch used the Tegra X1 (T210), which was a 4x A57 + 4x A53 with GM20B (Maxwell, 256-core).
So yeah, leaps and bounds coming from a GPU that's not even half of a GTX 750Ti.

 

[DS426]

How is RT in a handheld like this sensible? Battery life and temp are far more important here than desktop PC's and even than gaming laptops, so I just don't see it as prudent; moreover, based on the rumored specs, every bit of die space should be utilized for raster, not RT. Same regarding "AI". All for marketing.

 

[DS426]

"...So yeah, leaps and bounds coming from a GPU that's not even half of a GTX 750Ti."

I mean, it's a Nintendo product, so what do you expect?
[And I can say that as someone that the N64 will always be near and dear to 😉 ]

 

[ThisIsMe]

Since this is coming from NVidia, after taking out the DLSS AI stuff, it’s likely closer to 3-4 times the performance on a good day. You never really know which definition of “performance” they’re using at any given time.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

Can it match PS4 Pro? 🤣

 

[thestryker]

I find it interesting that they don't seem to have bothered to move it to a better node. This screams just using off the shelf silicon with no actual modification again. While this is hardly the end of the world it wouldn't have taken much to make something much better suited to this use case.

 

[oofdragon]

How is RT in a handheld like this sensible? Battery life and temp are far more important here than desktop PC's and even than gaming laptops, so I just don't see it as prudent; moreover, based on the rumored specs, every bit of die space should be utilized for raster, not RT. Same regarding "AI". All for marketing.

It's not.. it's just for the marketing and gimmicks.

Can it match PS4 Pro? 🤣

Nope.. it's a potatoe again, although it does surpass a little the decade old PS4

I find it interesting that they don't seem to have bothered to move it to a better node. This screams just using off the shelf silicon with no actual modification again. While this is hardly the end of the world it wouldn't have taken much to make something much better suited to this use case.

They definetly should have used a better node, but they know consumers r dumb and will pay for outdated crp

 

[Bikki]

That 10x > prior console if Im not mistaken is the same as rtx 5070 > rtx 4090.

 

[Notton]

I find it interesting that they don't seem to have bothered to move it to a better node. This screams just using off the shelf silicon with no actual modification again. While this is hardly the end of the world it wouldn't have taken much to make something much better suited to this use case.

AFAIK, the chip has been in production for at least a year and a half.
Nintendo has been stockpiling the chip, presumably to polish the launch titles.
IDK if they bothered to produce a ton of complete systems though.

 

[thestryker]

AFAIK, the chip has been in production for at least a year and a half.
Nintendo has been stockpiling the chip, presumably to polish the launch titles.
IDK if they bothered to produce a ton of complete systems though.

Ampere existed on both TSMC N7 and Samsung 8nm. That means the amount of effort to make this on say N6 would have been minimal. There's also more advanced nodes available from Samsung and given their struggles keeping their fabs active they'd have probably cut a good deal.

Not changing process node simply means they took the same approach as the Switch and just used an already in production part. While this is undoubtedly the cheapest option up front I have a hard time believing that it will end up saving them anything over the lifetime of the product. Let alone if they'd had nvidia make them a SoC with newer Arm cores where they could have cut the core count making the die even smaller.

 

[Pemalite]

The original Switch Tegra X1 wasn't "custom" past the clockrates... So the article is false.

 

[Giroro]

"What we really like to focus on is the value we can provide to our consumers."

Oh, that's funny. Nvidia said the exact same thing to justify GPUs that only had 10-20% better performance than the previous generation, despite a greater-than 20% price increase

"the company claims the new chip offers "10x the graphics performance"

Oh that's funny. Nvidia said the exact same thing to justify using fake frame generation on GPUs that only had 10-20% better performance than the previous generation, despite a greater-than 20% price increase.

"Nvidia is following Nintendo's lead..."

Sounds to me that Nintendo is actually following Nvidia's lead... Ninty is probably is over a barrel and getting reamed by Nvidia's chip pricing, too. Yay for backward compatibility.