Nintendo hopes to beat Switch, sell 20m Switch 2 consoles in first year, analysts say

Nintendo hopes to beat Switch, sell 20m Switch 2 consoles in first year, analysts say
ABizzel12h ago

@Neonridr

“ How do you know that these Switch numbers aren’t referring to the single precision processing?”

Firstly, from the technological standpoint:

Honestly, it’s just logic. There’s only so room on the die for CU cores. AMD is on 5nm with their handheld PC processors and they’re only able to get 16CUs on the die, now realistically they possibly could put more by reducing CPU cores from 8/16, down to 6/12, but that’s what they have.

Nintendo is using an older 8nm die from Samsung (which is what Ampere was on). Based on the rumored clock speeds and TFLOPS, the Switch 2 has to have either 12CUs or 24CUs.

The RTX 3050 is a dedicated GPU with an 130w power draw, only has 20CUs. This would mean that a Switch 2 with 24CUs has a die larger than a dedicated graphics card from the same generation, trapped inside of a handheld. That’s illogical, and an heat bomb ready to happen.

The RTX 3050 mobile (the laptop version), is an 16CU GPU, with an 45w power draw, still too much for a handheld, but much closer. So logically, 12CUs @ those rumored clock speeds, would equal the rumored TFLOPs, and with additional cuts to the architecture could very well function at a 10w draw in handheld mode, and boost to 30w when docked for max performance.

Which means real world performance is again closer to the 1.536 TFLOPs.

Secondly, from a Price standpoint:

Nintendo isn’t in the business of selling +$500 handhelds to an audience highly consisting of kids.

That’s not to say the Switch 2 is bad, it’s similar to an XBO Fat in performance in handheld mode, and similar to a PS4 in docked mode, but backed by DLSS for likely 50% resolution boost over PS4 in like for like games…Basically a 720p XBO in handheld mode, and a 1440p PS4 in docked docked for most 3rd party games. Nintendo games rarely need that level of performance so their IPs could very well be 1080p or SuperSampled on handheld mode, and up to 4K in docked mode on lighter games, or if DLSS 4 is that big of a boost with it’s new AI algorithm, and if it comes to Switch 2, which in theory it should.

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