There is no doubt that the market for portable consoles It’s booming, and it’s a market in which Nintendo is the doyen and has always dominated it. However, times are changing and even Nintendo has to adapt to new technologies and trends… although it is a portable console, modern games are more and more demanding in terms of hardware, and that means that the company will have to upgrade the hardware of your current flagship console, or you will be doomed to games that will never evolve.
Since the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, fans of the saga have had their Nintendo Switch furious, investing hours and hours in Link’s new adventures. The game looks incredibly good -especially on the OLED version of the console-, but many users have noticed that it lacks performance, and we can’t forget that the current Switch hardware already has something more. age 6 Adapt or die, they say.
The hardware the Nintendo Switch 2 should mount
Go ahead, in this section we are going to talk about what we personally think the next Nintendo console should bring to improve. We are not relying on any type of official or leaked information, we are just going to allow ourselves to dream about it, as we said in the introduction of the article, and therefore the hardware that the Nintendo Switch 2 will eventually have will certainly be very different.
In order to discern what hardware the next Switch 2 would need, we must first analyze the hardware that the current console is mounting and which, all things considered, has held up quite well so far, which deserves praise because as we previously mentioned the source material dates from the year 2017.
The current Nintendo console mounts a chip NVIDIA Tegra made by TSMC in your node 20nm; This chip has 8 physical cores with 8 processing threads, using a hybrid architecture with 4 Cortex A57 cores at 1 GHz and another 4 Cortex A53 cores at 1.3 GHz. On the other hand, the chip comes with 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, an amount that’s not bad for a portable console, but it can start to be insufficient with modern triple-A titles like Zelda: TOTK.
For these reasons, it would not be at all unreasonable to think that Nintendo wants to maintain its agreement with NVIDIA for the manufacture of the main SoC of the Switch 2, but logically adapting to current hardware. Therefore, the first thing that comes to mind is a new iteration of the chip. NVIDIA Tegra modern, but in this case made by Samsung one 5nmmuch more powerful but also efficient, which means better battery life.
If we stick to the portfolio of products that NVIDIA currently has on the market, we cannot avoid mentioning the SoC Tegra Orina chip of 12 hearts (ARM Cortex A78E) and with a 2048 Shader CPU Ampere GPU, the same amount as a RTX 3050 Mobile. Obviously we are talking about the hardware of a portable console in which battery life must prevail, so it would not be surprising if they incorporated this chip but personalized and, above all, cut; this would offer lower performance than the full Tegra Orin chip, but also much better battery life.
And nothing would happen: we’re talking about a chip that can easily move triple-A games at 720p resolution (which, remember, is console resolution) above 60 FPS, so lowering its performance in search of greater autonomy is not something unreasonable.
On the other hand, rumors claim that Nintendo will mount between 8 and 12 GB of RAM memory in its next console, but we think it would be absurd to do this when the simplest and surely the cheapest would be to mount 16 GB LPDDR5which is precisely the amount and type of memory that modern handheld consoles mount, as well as many laptops (which is why its mass production is cheaper than other non-standard amounts).
Without a doubt, with this hardware, the Nintendo Switch 2 could move games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom without breaking a sweat, even at resolutions above 720p. What do you think? Do you think Nintendo will continue to trust NVIDIA for the hardware of its next console?
