Nintendo Switch 2 Die Shot Confirms Custom NVIDIA Chip With These Specs
Thanks to the help of a powerful microscope, GeekerWan virtually peeled the chip layer by layer and got a good look at every one of its 207 square millimeters. The CPU complex is comprised of eight ARM Cortex-A78C cores, each with its own 256KB of L2 cache, and all wired to 4MB of shared L3 cache. Meanwhile, the GPU on hand is a design pulled from NVIDIA's Ampere portfolio, with 1536 CUDA cores. 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM sitting on a 128-bit bus and rated for 8533 MT/s serve both main components. GeekerWan does remark that the RAM speed in the final product might not be quite so high.
The GPU in question reportedly taped out in 2021, so it's relatively old by today's standards. Mobile hardware can never move at the speed desktop chips do, though, especially taking power envelopes into consideration. GeekerWan simulated a comparison of the Switch 2 GPU with an RTX 2050 that's based on the same architecture, and his estimates conclude the new console's graphics horsepower ought to match that of a desktop GTX 1050 Ti, at least in docked mode. In handheld mode, Geeker estimates GTX 750 Ti speeds.
The chip itself is the NVIDIA T239, a collection of silicon that known leaker Kopite7kimi had stated in June would be used for the Switch 2. It's manufactured with a blend of 10nm and 8nm tech, apparently by Samsung. This dovetails with the assumption that the GPU is from the Ampere era, a vintage designed for manufacturing on an 8nm process.
Nintendo's famous for using underpowered hardware for its consoles, but this time around the company claimed a 10x generational improvement from the extant Switch. GeekerWan's findings seem to almost corroborate that, as the Youtuber estimates a 7 to 7.5x uplift.
