The specifications of the Nintendo Switch 2 have been more or less confirmed. YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead claims that the handheld will be powered by the NVIDIA Tegra T239, an Ampere-based chip fabbed on Samsung’s 8nm process. On the CPU side, the SoC features eight Arm A78C cores paired with 1536 GPU cores based on the Ampere graphics architecture. The memory consists of a 128-bit bus, which can be paired with 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB of LPDDR5 memory.
Since the Switch 2 leverages the Maxwell architecture, it should fully support DLSS 2 and its derivatives, but Frame Generation will remain locked out. The high-speed LPDDR5 memory produces a bandwidth of 102GB/s when paired with the 128-bit bus. The overall performance of this SoC is expected to be notably lower than the Xbox Series S.
The memory and clock details are unclear, but the Switch 2 is unlikely to come close to the existing consoles, even losing to the newer handhelds like the ASUS Ally and the Lenovo Legion GO. The NVIDIA T239 is one of the cheapest SoCs fabbed on a mature node that’s several years old.
Nintendo is likely to tweak the T239 for its purposes. For example, some SMs may be disabled while the GPU clocks remain open to adjustment. The LPDDR5 memory can also be varied between 8GB and 16GB. This should give the company sizable profit margins over its next handheld console. MLID expects a price tag of $399 to $499 for the Switch 2.
