Nintendo Switch Pro To Sport A Chip Used In A Car Autopilot Field

Nintendo is scheduled to hold an E3 face-to-face meeting on June 16, where the Switch Pro should be launched. Today, kopite7kimi posted a photo, which displays the gaming console will sport the NVIDIA Orin chip. He also added that the Big N chose a custom version, which has a model T239.

The standard version of this chip is the T234. The latter is a car autopilot chip. The entry-level variant has a power consumption of 15 watts.

However, the Nintendo Switch Pro will use a modified version because the niche this chip is designed for and gaming consoles differ a lot. Say, the NVIDIA Orin T234 has a 12-core Cortex-A78AE (Hercules) CPU, an Ampere architecture GPU with built-in 2048 CUDA cores, supports LPDDR5 memory, and has a bandwidth reaching 200GB/s. Thus, the latter is almost 10 times that of the Tegra X1. (2017 Switch’s Tegra X1 processor only offers a 64-bit bus and 25.6 GB/s bandwidth.) Can you imagine what a performance improvement the new chip will bring?

From the GPU CUDA scale, it is the same as the RTX 3050 on the notebooks. But the latter uses an 8nm process and has a power consumption of 35~80 watts. As for the Orin, it uses a 7nm manufacturing process. At the same time, the Ampere architecture will guarantee a 4K performance in TV mode. We guess this is the main reason why Nintendo chose this GPU.

We understand that the customized version of the Orin SoC won’t bring as much GPU processing power as a full-sized version. But the parameters of the SoC we have been talking about above make us think the Nintendo Switch Pro will be much more powerful than the previous-generation console. This SoC has not been officially announced yet. So we still should get acquainted with full specs and clock rates of the Ampere/Hercules processor. In this sense, we can’t compare the T234 (Orin) with the T210/T214 (Tegra X1/X1A) at the moment. Of course, we can, but it wouldn’t have any value because the T239 will differ a lot.

Prior to this, we have heard that the Nintendo Switch Pro devkits have already been sent out to Big N’s third-party game makers. According to the previous rumors, this gaming console will use an AMD chip based on a 5nm process, a faster GPU, possible DLSS limitations, Xbox Game Pass, and even 120 fps at 720p theoretical capability