The Nintendo Switch 2 has been thrust back into the spotlight after a recent leak that showed off its possible final design. We know that the console will use a new NVIDIA Tegra SoC, and we have a pretty good idea of its possible final specifications, but what we didn’t know is that AMD tried to take NVIDIA’s place.
Moore’s Law is Dead claims that AMD pushed hard for a place in Nintendo’s new console. It did not make things easy for NVIDIA, which means that it offered a very competitive APU in terms of power, efficiency and cost. but in the end the big N opted to choose NVIDIA.
It doesn’t go into the technical details, but the source does give us a very important piece of information that was ultimately key to NVIDIA winning the contract to design the Nintendo Switch 2 SoC, and that is that the green giant’s solution offered superior performance to AMD’s using the 5 watt mode.
The 5 watt mode could be the one that Nintendo Switch 2 will use by default in portable mode for maximize battery lifeI am convinced that NVIDIA’s victory with such low consumption was largely due to the CPU, which uses the ARM architecture, while AMD uses the x64 architecture in its APUs.
In dock mode, it is very likely that the Nintendo Switch 2 will reach much higher values. Everything will depend on the cooling system, but I would bet on between 15 watts and 30 wattsThis would greatly improve performance in dock mode, and could make this console a much more competitive and interesting system.
Nintendo Switch 2: Ampere architecture with a touch of Ada
Nintendo’s console will use a low-power integrated GPU based on the Ampere architecture. NVIDIA offered the Japanese company the possibility of using a GPU based on Ada Lovelace, and manufactured on the 4nm node, but Nintendo preferred the Ampere-based option. due to a question of costs.
An SoC with an Ampere-based GPU cost Nintendo much less money, and the Samsung’s 8nm node This allows the chip to be further reduced in manufacturing costs while maintaining a high success rate on the wafer, as it is a fully mature node. However, to improve Ampere efficiency, this GPU incorporates some features exclusive to Ada Lovelace, and also has other improvements that make it a hybrid between both architectures.
The Nintendo Switch 2 SoC is basically a cost-optimized version of Tegra Orin, tailored to the needs of a portable console. Its specifications have not yet been confirmed, but the most reliable information I have right now says that this graphics core will have between 1,280 and 1,536 shaders, that will work less than 1 GHz in laptop mode (5 watt mode) and will support NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction.
Source: www.muycomputer.com
