It seems the excitement around the Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t just about its games or features, but also the impressive tech under its hood. The spotlight is now on the chip that powers this console, and it’s no surprise that NVIDIA’s expertise plays a big role here.
The Nintendo Switch 2, offering dazzling visuals with 4K at 60 frames per second when docked, didn’t come with a detailed tech specification upon release. However, those in the know were quick to point fingers at NVIDIA’s likely involvement with their custom Tegra SoCs. Now, thanks to a recent online reveal, we can confirm that the Switch 2 is powered by the Tegra239 chip. Credit for this little bit of sleuthing goes to @Kurnalsalts, who shared an image of the chip labeled “T239.”
While the pictured chip doesn’t bring all the answers about its inner workings, we’ve pieced together a good amount of the puzzle from existing info. The Tegra239 is believed to house eight Arm Cortex-A78C cores, equipped with a unique hybrid GPU that fuses aspects of NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace and Ampere architectures, and it boasts 1536 CUDA cores. Depending on whether it’s docked or not, the CPU is clocking in somewhere between 1.1 GHz and 1.5 GHz. On the memory front, we’re looking at a 128-bit interface using the speedy LPDDR5 technology.
Although the specifics of Tegra239 are somewhat guarded, we do know it supports NVIDIA’s superior DLSS upscaling technology, a feature that contributes greatly to the Switch’s performance prowess. For those of you who are eager to dive into the technical details, we’ve covered them extensively in another article you might want to check out. With this latest chip, NVIDIA is doubling down on its commitment to pushing the boundaries of custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and maintaining its exclusive partnership with Nintendo.
As for NVIDIA’s future aspirations, the gaming world is abuzz with rumors about their upcoming ventures into the AI PC market. Whispers about a collaboration with MediaTek to roll out a new ARM-based SoC, potentially named the N1X and N1 series, have been circulating since last year. Yet, we’re still waiting for more concrete updates on that front, and as usual, we’ll be keeping a close eye on any developments.
