Nintendo Reported To Use Nvidia's Tegra 239 Octa-core Chip On Next-gen Switch

It has been nearly six years since the first-generation Switch was launched. This handheld console equipped with NVIDIA Tegra X1 custom chip can no longer meet the increasing demand for game performance and user experience. Nintendo is obviously already brewing a new generation of handheld platform.

Nintendo has previously stated that the current Switch is performing very well, and the new model will be announced at an appropriate time, but the current NS has just passed half of its life cycle. This shows that Nintendo is indeed developing a new machine, but I am afraid it will not be available in the near future.

The whistleblower @kopite7kimi previously revealed that the chip codenamed Black Knight on the Switch Pro (undecided) is a Tegra Orin T239 chip specially customized by NVIDIA, based on the Ampere GPU architecture (with 2048 CUDA cores) + ARM Cortex-A78AE CPU core.

The latest leaked information shows that the new NS may indeed use the Nvidia Tegra 239 chip. According to Reddit user u/followmeinblue, this is an SoC with an octa-core CPU, and his news was confirmed by an Nvidia employee, as well as a related comment from a Nintendo developer on the Linux kernel mailing list.

As of this leak, we now know the following details about the next-gen Nintendo Switch console:

• Nvidia T239 SoC
• 8 core CPU - probably ARM Cortex A78C, A78
• Ampere-based GPU that may contain some Lovelace features
• 2nd Gen Nintendo Switch Graphics API section includes DLSS 2.2 features and ray tracing support

We learnt that NVIDIA Tegra X1 was released in March 2015, with a process of TSMC 20nm and a TDP of 15 watts. The CPU is four 1.9GHz Cortex-A57 cores and four 1.3GHz Cortex-A53 cores. The GPU is based on the Maxwell architecture of Nvidia's own PC graphics card, with 256 cores and a frequency of 1GHz.

In addition to the Nintendo Switch, Tegra X1-powered devices include the Nvidia Shield (an Android TV-based multimedia game console) and the Google Pixel C Android tablet.

However, the Tegra X1 built into the Nintendo Switch is a castrated version, with 4 A53s disabled and a frequency of 1.02 GHz, which is lower than the 1.9 GHz of the full version of the Tegra X1.