There is no doubt that the market for portable consoles It is booming, and it is a market in which Nintendo is a dean and has always dominated it. However, times change and even Nintendo must adapt to new technologies and trends… as much as it is a portable console, modern games are increasingly demanding in terms of hardware, and that means that the company You will need to upgrade the hardware of your current star console, or you will be condemned to games that will never evolve.
Since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is out, fans of the saga have had their Nintendo Switch fuming, investing hours and hours in Link’s new adventures. The game looks amazingly good -especially on the OLED version of the console-, but many users have noticed that it lacks in terms of performance, and we cannot forget that the current Switch hardware already has something more 6 years old Adapt or die, they say.
The hardware that the Nintendo Switch 2 should mount
Go ahead, in this section, what we are going to talk about is what we personally think the next Nintendo console should bring to improve. We are not basing ourselves on any type of official or leaked information, we are simply going to allow ourselves to dream about it, as we have said in the introduction of the article, and therefore the hardware that the Nintendo Switch 2 will eventually have will almost certainly be very different.
In order to discern what hardware the next Switch 2 would need, it is first necessary to analyze the hardware that the current console mounts and that, all told, has held up quite well so far, something worthy of praise because as we have mentioned before the original hardware 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 is not bad for a portable console but that can start to be insufficient with modern triple A titles like Zelda: TOTK.
For these reasons, it would not be unreasonable at all 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 manufactured by Samsung at 5nmmuch more powerful but also efficient, which means better battery life.
If we stick to the product portfolio that NVIDIA currently has on the market, we cannot avoid mentioning the SoC Tegra Orina chip 12 cores (ARM Cortex A78E) and with an Ampere GPU of 2,048 Shader Processors, the same amount that a RTX 3050 Mobile. Obviously, we are talking about the hardware of a portable console in which battery autonomy 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 are talking about a chip that can move triple A games at 720p resolution (which, remember, is that of the console) above 60 FPS with ease, so cutting its performance a bit in pursuit of a greater autonomy is not something unreasonable.
On the other hand, rumors state 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 that when the simplest and surely cheapest would be to mount 16GB LPDDR5which is precisely the amount and type of memory that modern handheld consoles are mounting, 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 higher than 720p. What do you think? Do you think that Nintendo will continue to trust NVIDIA for the hardware of its next console?
