As the launch of Nintendo’s next-generation Switch Pro console draws near, the specifications have started becoming clearer. There has been a lot of speculation over which SoC the handheld console will use, with some rumors even suggesting a 5nm design based on NVIDIA’s yet unannounced Ada Lovelace uarch. However, considering the relatively short time since Ampere was launched, that’s highly unlikely. We’re almost certainly going to see a GPU based on the Ampere architecture, same as the RTX 30 series GPUs.
One of the most accurate sources on NVIDIA hardware (kopite7kimi) has indicated that this indeed is the case. As per the leaker, the Nintendo Switch Pro SoC will be based on the Tegra Orin chip, otherwise known as the T234 (codenamed Hercules). The upcoming console will use a customized version of the SoC, possibly with eight A78AE cores instead of 12 and slightly fewer GPU shaders (1,536 is a good estimate).
It’s important to note that the Orin chip is still an unreleased product so we don’t know much about its actual performance and how it stacks up against the Tegra X1. It will use the newer LPDDR5 memory with a 256-bit bus and a bandwidth of 200GB/s. Considering that the chip was originally designed with neural networks in mind, it’s likely that that part of the silicon will be repurposed for DLSS.
