Tweet
Last week, news emerged of Nintendo's immediate and longer term plans for the Switch, reported on the Wall Street Journal, no less. The headline made it clear that there'd be no Switch hardware revision this year, with Nintendo's emphasis shifting to USB-C peripherals and its fascinating Labo initiative. However, tucked away at the foot of the report is coverage of a February investor briefing, where Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima talks about his plans of extending Switch's lifespan beyond the five to six year console average, taking the lifespan of the console hybrid up to 2021 at least. To make this work, hardware revisions may be inevitable.The question of when the first of those updates is set to arrive will almost certainly be a matter of economics - specifically, the build cost of the Tegra X1 processor currently used by Nintendo. The chip is mass produced by Taiwainese semi-conductor giant TSMC, and it's based on their 20nm technology. A stepping stone between various 28nm variants and the more widely adopted 16nm FinFET, 20nm was something of a failure overall. Apple utilised it for its iPhone 6 range of phones, but dropped it for the 6S, while fellow mobile chip giant Qualcomm also used it only fleetingly. Switch has sold astonishingly well for a games console, but those numbers aren't large enough to sustain an entire manufacturing line. At some point, keeping 20nm online will cost Nintendo more than simply moving onto a cheaper, better technology.
The good news is that Switch technology partner Nvidia already has a perfectly capable replacement part - Tegra X2. It's a curious piece of tech that doesn't really suit the Nvidia's aims of cornering the automotive and AI markets. It's essentially a 16nmFinFET replacement for the X1, with strategic improvements: twice the memory bandwidth and a move to the Pascal GPU architecture (which in the case of the X2 is essentially a more efficient version of the X1's Maxwell graphics core). X2 retains the quad-core ARM Cortex A57 set-up of the X1, and adds an additional CPU cluster based on Nvidia's own Denver architecture - which may or may not be active in a Switch successor (X1 also has inactive areas on the chip). It's a weird part for Nvidia to produce at all, but makes perfect sense as a replacement processor for Switch further on down the line: it should have full compatibility with the X1 with the potential for performance improvements via higher clock speeds and more memory bandwidth, in addition to battery life improvements.
Read more…
More...