NVIDIA Job Listing Suggests Next Gen Nintendo Switch Might Be In The Works

Nintendo sells consoles based on the strength of its game experiences rather than the power of their processors, but technology marches on regardless, and the venerable NVIDIA Tegra X1 is getting pretty long in the tooth. While its ARM Cortex-A57 CPUs are roughly comparable to the old AMD Jaguar CPUs in the last-generation consoles, it only has four, and only three of them can be used by games.

Meanwhile, its little 256-shader NVIDIA Maxwell GPU and 25.6 GB/sec shared memory bandwidth pale in comparison to previous-gen PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, to say nothing of their upgraded models. Developers working on the Switch have pulled some outright magic with the little handheld, but Nintendo is assuredly hard at work on its next-gen system, and given the success it has had in partnership with NVIDIA, that next system is almost surely based on Team Green's hardware once again.

Of course, the listing doesn't mention Nintendo or the Switch at all. Any details of what you would be working on are surely top-secret, and NVIDIA would likely require the new employee to sign an NDA. The fact of the matter is that we are speculating as to what kind of project the listing is actually for—perhaps a new Switch, perhaps another Nintendo console, or possibly something completely unrelated, like a new PC-based console for a specific market.

Still, the Switch is the only console on the market right now that sports NVIDIA hardware. Unless it's for another Ouya-like, or perhaps a new NVIDIA Shield TV box, we'd put our money on a new Switch. That's despite the reality that there have been consistently-disproved rumors of a new Switch for over three years. The latest talk on the matter was back in April, when some very sharp Zelda Breath of the Wild 2 footage sparked talk of the showing being too smooth for the Switch.