Recently uncovered by @Kepler_L2, it appears that NVIDIA has been developing two customized System on a Chip (SOC) designs, based on their Ampere GPU architecture.
These specialized SOCs, named T234 and T239, have been linked to potential integration within the highly anticipated Nintendo Switch 2 handheld. Notably, these findings were discovered within NVIDIA’s GitHub “Open-GPU” section.
Otherwise known as “Orin“, these SoCs have predominately been used in autonomous vehicles and comes with 12 ARM Hercules cores alongside a maximum of 2,048 CUDA cores based on the Ampere architecture, it is also tapped out on Samsung’s 8nm processing node.
It also contains an additional 64 Tensor cores for accelerative purposes.
Speculations suggest that the presence of two SOCs could imply the existence of a standard version and a Pro variant according to rumors from Tech_Reve, it is believed that the T239 SoC is expected to be integrated into Nintendo’s upcoming console.
Because obviously it would be far too physically large and costly (for Nintendo) to shoehorn 12 ARM cores and 2,048 CUDA cores inside of its next handheld, so the obvious scenario here is that T239 is a customized variation with fewer processing cores and fewer shaders which isn’t much of a worry considering how when the Nintendo Switch launched back in March 2017, it was equipped with a custom NVIDIA Tegra X1 SoC based on the Maxwell architecture.
The Ampere architecture is a significant advancement over the older Maxwell architecture, delivering a substantial leap in performance and capabilities even with so few CUDA cores and will likely match or even surpass raw performances of the XBOX One and Sony PlayStation 4, and will be guaranteed to surpass them both in terms of performance and visual quality in games due to DLSS capabilities.
When the Switch first launched the hardware within was already a couple of years old at this point and here we are in 2023 and the console continues to sell by the dozen.
It was previously thought that Nintendo would announce a successor to the Switch back in 2021, but Nintendo merely gave us all a slap in the goddamn face with the announcement of the Switch OLED.
Same console, same drifting joycons, now with a cheap OLED screen for only $50 more.
Because why update a system that continues to sell tens of thousands of units on a weekly basis worldwide, doesn’t matter that the hardware inside is almost a decade old, had Nintendo not stepped in and gotten one over on NVIDIA I am sure that they would have written off their Tegra X1 stock as a loss, because the Shield TV is hardly a big seller.
Considering how stellar NVIDIA’s upscaling capabilities are with the Maxwell based X1 SoC featured inside the Shield TV Pro, it should come as no surprise that the much larger and more advanced Ampere based system will be able to incorporate ray tracing, though why the fuck would you care for vaseline reflections on a tiny handheld device I haven’t the slightest fucking clue and obvious proper DLSS support.
DLSS on the Nintendo Switch is possibly the only use case for the technology that’s actually positive rather than regressive, so I’m all for it.
It also begs to question whether the Ampere based SoC will be supportive of NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 frame generation tech, which native Ampere GPUs are unsupported in the consumer space, despite the fact that it has already been confirmed that RTX 3000 can support frame generation, the results wouldn’t be as desirable.
But never the less I believe that the new Nintendo Switch will somehow and someway support DLSS 3 because NVIDIA’s software department is simply among the best in the world.
