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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)

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Just for clarification. Assuming the 2025 rumours are true, does that mean Nintendo will have to mention that the Switch successor will release in March 2025, at their meeting for the next fiscal year?
 
If all this is true, which we don't know, my concern wouldn't be at all about a 4-month technological difference between November 2024 and March 2025, but rather about the Switch's release schedule in 2024. I imagine that a number of titles that we imagined to be cross-gen will have to come and do the work.
 
My interest in the Switch 2 has diminished greatly.

I don't know what the fuck you're doing Nintendo but it's not good. You have an amazing piece of hardware on your hands and delaying it any further than it needs to be is self sabotage. Don't fuck this up, you're going to have another Wii U on your hands.
 
Hermii said:
Its possible they will just go ahead and release Prime 4 on Switch 1, even if it was originally planned as a cross gen launch title.
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I mean, it was originally planned as a Switch 1 title. I think it's just been revisionist thinking/assumptions that have people saying with such surety that it's now cross-gen. Unless there are solid leaks I haven't seen.
 
It's just wild to me that a chip that was ready back in 2022 and could have been used to make a Switch Pro, has just been sat on by Nintendo for years so they could put it in a sequel system.

Wasn't Nintendo sending out dev kits for T239 all the way back in 2022? How do they not have software ready to go at this point?

None of this really makes sense unless there's some entirely new chip they've been developing over the last few years that we're completely oblivious to.
 
justanotherperson said:
Could a delay to March 2025 enable them to upgrade the RAM to LPDDR5T? It could be very benefitial to them and, maybe, at a low cost, since it seems based on LPDDR5X.
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I think Nintendo and Nvidia have to change the RAM controller inside the SoC in order to support the I/O rate of 9600 MT/s that LPPDR5T supports, which requires another SoC tape out, which at that point is arguably no longer T239.
justanotherperson said:
-12 cores like the Orin chip
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If Nintendo wants to continue using the Cortex-A78C cores (here and here), then 12 Cortex-A78C cores requires two CPU clusters since the Cortex-A78C only supports up to 8 CPU cores per CPU cluster, which could introduce more latency since there's more hardware components that needs to be communicate with.

Same deal with the Cortex-A710 since that also supports up to 8 CPU cores per CPU cluster, especially if Nintendo wants to maintain 32-bit support for Nintendo Switch backwards compatibility, with the caveat of having worse performance and power efficiency compared to the Cortex-A78.
ocR1sOg.png

Lancelot said:
Do we know if it will be Lovelace based or Blackwell?
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Nvidia was pretty clear Thor's using a GPU based on the Ada Lovelace architecture.
The next-generation superchip comes packed with the cutting-edge AI capabilities first introduced in the NVIDIA Hopper™ Multi-Instance GPU architecture, along with the NVIDIA Grace™ CPU and NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU.
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UPDATE 8.45pm UK: Eurogamer sources can now corroboate the earlier reports that the Switch 2, once destined for release later in 2024, is now set for Q1 2025.

The console's launch moving into early next year - but still within the coming financial year - is designed to ensure Switch 2's launch line-up features as many titles as possible, Eurogamer understands.
 
N 2 Deep said:
2011 Wii had Skyward Sword

They're killing any momentum they had by doing this

It's the equivalent of Wii's 2012 except they are waiting even longer
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Switch still has far more momentum than Wii had in 2011 and certainly 2012. Zelda SS was basically the only high profile release in 2011, so it really felt like the software drought was 2011 and 2012 before the Wii U released. Its just hard to rationalize a reason for Nintendo to intentionally have a down year. If we were to estimate sales for all the announced first party games listed for release in 2024, they wont total what Zelda TotK sold last year. Third parties have already mostly moved on from doing big ports, so software sales on Switch are likely to decline significantly. Maybe cut in half year over year. To limp through 2024 is just hard to accept when Nintendo has had the good fortune of Switch having so much success for so many years.

Its hard for my disappointment not to bleed over into my opinion on this whole thing. If T239 in on 4N and Nintendo has a stacked lineup of software ready to go, they will be fine and I am sure SNG will be another great success story for Nintendo. Waiting an extra 6 months doesn't really change the outlook for success, but it is a big time bummer when we have been waiting for years. Nintendo does run the risk of losing engagement with players this year. For Switch gamers who have been gaming daily on their Switch since 2017, the system is getting pretty long in the tooth.

If we are looking at a March 2025 release, I do not expect a full teaser trailer in March. I suspect they will acknowledge the new hardware, set the release month and then tell everyone to look forward to more details later in the year.
 
Sol said:
It's just wild to me that a chip that was ready back in 2022 and could have been used to make a Switch Pro, has just been sat on by Nintendo for years so they could put it in a sequel system.
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In what dimension could it have been used as a Switch Pro? It‘s basically a full generational leap

Jake said:
Here we are, still playing on 2015 hardware for another year because Nintendo lol
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If you want to have the most up to date hardware, no point in really playing on consoles
 
Individualised said:
My interest in the Switch 2 has diminished greatly.

I don't know what the fuck you're doing Nintendo but it's not good. You have an amazing piece of hardware on your hands and delaying it any further than it needs to be is self sabotage. Don't fuck this up, you're going to have another Wii U on your hands.
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¿qué?
 
LukasManak22 said:


UPDATE 8.45pm UK: Eurogamer sources can now corroboate the earlier reports that the Switch 2, once destined for release later in 2024, is now set for Q1 2025.

The console's launch moving into early next year - but still within the coming financial year - is designed to ensure Switch 2's launch line-up features as many titles as possible, Eurogamer understands.
Click to expand...


Fml

Bye March reveal.
 
Marketing aside, I don't think the Wii U was conceptually sound. A better name, branding, advertising could've helped, but 'two screens at home' did not garner much enthusiasm vs. 'two screens on a portable', even if there were some cool uses.

Switch has more inherent appeal imo, one could sense it from the fervor from that first reveal. A straightforward Switch 2 would not do as bad as the Wii U. They would have to severely poison the idea for that to happen.

Sol said:
It's just wild to me that a chip that was ready back in 2022 and could have been used to make a Switch Pro, has just been sat on by Nintendo for years so they could put it in a sequel system.
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The GPU architecture in T239 is not natively backwards compatible and there is a generational leap in performance. It would not have made a good chip for a Switch Pro.
 
N 2 Deep said:
It has hardware based deep learning with Tensore Cores no?

Not the deep learning accelerator found in newer Nvidia chips that uses less processing power?
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I get where this misunderstanding is coming from.

Orin (T234) being a dedicated AI chip made for self driving vehicles it has a Deep Learning Accelerator. Digital Foundry theorised that Drake would retain this to accelerate DLSS. It doesn't. There is no evidence a DLAA would even be capable of DLSS, and its not present in any desktop card Ampere or Lovelace.
 
I feel like if we could just see how big the Switch 2 will be, we could somewhat write off the 4N vs 8N debate, but now we may have to go through more months of back and forth🥲
 
0
Goodtwin said:
This will be a pretty big bummer if true. I'm inclined to believe there is something to this because both Eurogamer and VGC are backing it up. This does make the situation really strange. No general Direct this February because there isn't enough high profile Nintendo developed software to warrant a full scale Direct. Current rumors are suggesting that a Partners Showcase may happen next week. With Switch entering its eighth year on the market, how in the world does Nintendo find itself in a situation where they need to delay? The lineup for Switch this year is very weak. Its not quite as bad as what happened with the Wii in 2011, but it will be a pretty hard fall for sales. Who knows, maybe Nintendo really wants Switch to take that top spot making it the highest selling console ever. LOL
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Who knew that Nintendo suits are so into console wars that they are prepared to sacrifice revenue and profits to take the top console warrior prize.
 
seyfeselassie said:
Just for clarification. Assuming the 2025 rumours are true, does that mean Nintendo will have to mention that the Switch successor will release in March 2025, at their meeting for the next fiscal year?
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At this rate we're either getting a hardware reveal in March for this year or a hardware announcement in March for next year. We likely won't have to wait too long to know if 2024 is dead or not.
 
Nintendo really gonna fuck themselves over with this one, how do they always find a way to do something absolutely stupid.

As long as there is a reveal in the next 1-2 months I won’t care I just want to see what the console looks like 😂
 
I swear, some people in this thread amplify the pessimistic takes so they can whip themselves into a frenzy. You know who you are. You have a great avatar, but times up.
 
Brofield said:
That's actually something I also wanted to ask about when I came into this thread; at one point of delays would the T239 have to be scrapped just to get the next "mature" chip? Wouldn't it be 2025/2026?
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Not 100% sure what you're asking, but chip development like this, based on what we've seen from AMD and Nvidia, takes 3 years. So if you wanted to replace T239 with something for a 2025 release, you would have needed to start in 2022.

But let's pretend for a second that development is instantaneous, that I can package up a SOC from any existing technologies right this very second. The differences between the chip you'd make today right this very second and the leaked T239 specs would be little more than a footnote. And even those differences might not be good as they'd represent potentially increased costs for very little (or even no) improvements. Let's write them out even, so we can see what we're talking about.

We could replace T239's modified Ampere with stock Ada. This is almost no change at all, the architectures are so similar. You could get the larger Optical Flow Accelerator, but because of limitations of being a handheld, Frame Generation is not likely to ever work. The larger OFA might be a literal waste of space, so this could effectively be a downgrade.

You could update from LPDDR5 to LPDDR5X. It's possible this has already happened. 5X would decrease battery life for the sake of extra bandwidth. Benchmarking suggests that extra bandwidth might be much of a performance win. This is a shrug.

ARM processors have actually been progressing nicely. You could replace the A78C cores with A715s. This would break Switch 1 backwards compat for what ARM advertises as a whopping 10% increase in performance. You could use A710s instead. This would keep BC, and ARM advertises the same 10% performance increase, but benchmarks suggest the opposite with an actual drop in performance.

You could put your chip on TSMC N3. Going by existing products on that process node, Nintendo could probably do that and launch this thing at $750. It's a non-starter.

The technology to make T239 significantly better does not yet exist and is unlikely to till late 2027, at which point it will still be prohibitively expensive. That's just the reality on the ground.


Brofield said:
If T239 is still advanced enough ahead of its competitors, it still is gonna have less time on the market before Xbox Series X2/PS6 now come out and games are being made with those power specs in mind,
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No one is making games with PS6 specs in mind while they're still desperate to figure out how to make games with PS5 specs profitable.

Specs matter. Features matter more. Switch wasn't much more powerful than the 360, but games didn't look like the 360, and they certainly didn't only come from the 360 era. Why? Because Maxwell (the GPU arch) and the rest of the console (solid state storage, the RAM pool, the CPU design) were all much more modern.

If AMD delivers a truly innovative GPU design that causes Xbox Series 2 to completely alter how DirectX works, the Microsoft will push that version of DirectX into Windows, which will force Intel and Nvidia to redesign their GPU pipelines to be DirectX14 (or whatever) compatible, which will alter how PC software works, which will start to leave T239 behind.

Tellingly, Microsoft seems to be driving the updates and forcing AMD to keep up. And what MS is pushing are things like RT and ML, forcing AMD to keep up with Nvidia's design. Right now it looks like T239's feature set will have a long life.

Brofield said:
Let's be real; Jester's Privilege or no, everytime Raccoon has had reason to mock Fami he's always been right.
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Truth
Lancelot said:
I wonder if the NVN2 info even applies at this point, to be honest. The T239 will be taped out three years ago by 2025, has a chip ever been sit upon for this long?
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No clue. Custom SOCs for mass market devices that last more than a couple years are pretty rare, and we only have knowledge on T239's tapeout because the Lapsus hack gave us data we could cross-check elsewhere. That was an unprecedented event.
 
Jake said:
I’ve been using my Xbox Series X for third party games for the past 2 years, so I’ll be fine as far as that goes. For first party, guess I’ll stick with Mario vs DK and Paper Mario TTYD
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By 2026 or 2027 or 2028 or whatever, it’ll be dated hardware too but I guess Microsoft wants you to keep playing it on it because Microsoft
 
Goodtwin said:
This will be a pretty big bummer if true. I'm inclined to believe there is something to this because both Eurogamer and VGC are backing it up. This does make the situation really strange. No general Direct this February because there isn't enough high profile Nintendo developed software to warrant a full scale Direct. Current rumors are suggesting that a Partners Showcase may happen next week. With Switch entering its eighth year on the market, how in the world does Nintendo find itself in a situation where they need to delay? The lineup for Switch this year is very weak. Its not quite as bad as what happened with the Wii in 2011, but it will be a pretty hard fall for sales. Who knows, maybe Nintendo really wants Switch to take that top spot making it the highest selling console ever. LOL
Click to expand...
I keep beating this dead horse but this is also with whatever team they supposedly have in charge of handling their OS and NSO having barely done jack shit lately. Genesis NSO hasn't been updated since June of last year, Nintendo can't even bother dropping at least one GBA ROM per month, E-shop still runs like shit, etc.
 
Hermii said:
He was not correct though. Newer The deep learning accelerator isn't found in newer Lovelace cards, its Orin specific.
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Thraktor never mentioned anything about the Deep Learning Accelerators (DLAs) though.

And N 2 Deep was asking if T239 was using Tensor cores to do hardware based deep learning and not the DLAs, which is correct.
 
Dakhil said:
Thraktor never mentioned anything about the Deep Learning Accelerators (DLAs) though.

And N 2 Deep was asking if T239 was using Tensor cores to do hardware based deep learning and not the DLAs, which is correct.
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Yea that part was correct, but the second half of the sentence was mistaken.

"Not the deep learning accelerator found in newer Nvidia chips that uses less processing power?"
 
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