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

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I said to Hotgirlvideos69 Can you please just shut up it’s going to be a next gen Switch it will play Switch and Switch 2 games aka the Successor to Switch Nintendo isn’t making a different next gen device when the hybrid console is successful and all the iPhones are next gen devices because there better Than the Predecessor
 
Gerald said:
might sounds werid but delay to March 2025 made me even more sure that it will be TSMC 4N
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I'm also hoping for 4N, but this isn't going to have any effect at all.

OctoSplattack said:
We're aiming for 3000 pages and the best way to do that is to share bad Twitter takes and proceed to spend dozens of posts groaning about how bad they are?
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This take really isn't as clever as you think it is.
 
Danny said:
They don't have any options, it seems they are panicked about Switch 2 getting emulation year 1 so tries to stop it happening before release, if that isn't possible and they lose the lawsuit all bets are off.
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You are overestimating the "growing" piracy scene and how much Nintendo is worried about that.
 
OctoSplattack said:
I can't tell if you thought I was giving a serious answer or if you were just calling me out for the bad attempt at comedy.
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I interpreted it as the former, but the latter wouldn't have helped much either. :)

We were doing so well too for a while too without those type of tweets and/or YT clips creeping into here.

Gerald said:
So you think no matter what there will be 3W budget for CPU and 3W for GPU? I’m think that on 4N it will be 5W for CPU and 5W for GPU so we will have TDP 15W or lower
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I'm not sure about the 3W vs 5W budget thing - I'm just saying the delay would have no effect whatsoever on the choice of node process. Unless I misunderstood.
 
Gerald said:
So you think no matter what there will be 3W budget for CPU and 3W for GPU? I’m think that on 4N it will be 5W for CPU and 5W for GPU so we will have TDP 15W or lower
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He said the release date wont have any effect at all for which node it will be. A 6 month delay isn't enough to do a die shrink.
 
Hermii said:
He said the release date wont have any effect at all for which node it will be. A 6 month delay isn't enough to do a die shrink.
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I’m sure somebody has already explained a bit, but what can change ahead of production start with an additional 6 months?
 
Sin & Punishment said:
Nintendo has to rip the band aid off. And if they don't, leakers will.
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We are going to get our leak out soon anyway.GF might not
ILikeFeet said:
But an MMO company could...
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I Pokémon is pushing forward in that direction if you notice the small details.
Gerald said:
But is another point that Switch 2 won’t have any problems with 3P AAA ports but that we know
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The only problem right now I see would be Sony buying more time exclusive over aggressively.
kasparov77 said:
GF will never
EVER
make an all regions game.
Multiple regions can happen (already happened, multiple times if you include old gb/ds games and the SV DLC).
But all regions in a single game is never gonna happen, ever.
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Maybe not all, maybe so but I think the smart approach is build a prototype of the region and use it in a product before putting it in Gen 10.

I mean I can't imagine how much fun you can have in 1 city (referring to Legend ZA).
 
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
Mario Kart, Splatoon, and Smash are Games as a Service/Live Service games, just in a more limited/traditional pre-2017 meaning where they have like two years of DLC and a bit longer in terms of bug fixing and balance updates.
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Thank you!!! I was telling people that but they just flipped out!
 
Jersh said:
I think PCIe 3 is just the thermal reality for microSD at the moment, at least going by the other few attempts out there at SD Express. T239 will almost certainly have PCIe 4 support, but that doesn't mean Samsung can easily make a card for it.
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Yeah, I was just talking about the hardware support in T239. Power/heat might be an issue for PCIe 4.0 microSD for a little while longer. Samsung are making NVMe and UFS controllers on their 5nm process now, which should be quite efficient, but SD Express may not be a big enough market to warrant using such an advanced node, so I wouldn't be surprised if their controller for this is made on an older process. I would imagine this will be far more efficient than any existing SD Express cards, though, as they're all using a 28nm controller, and even an "old" Samsung process like 8nm should be a huge improvement in efficiency.

Dakhil said:
Perhaps this is implausible, but I was thinking that perhaps Samsung's releasing 256 GB SD Express microSD later this year to get the ball rolling in terms of having the SD Express microSD card prices decreasing before Nintendo's new hardware launches at March 2025 at the earliest and before higher capacity microSD Express cards can be introduced.

In fact, back in May 2016, Samsung unveiled the 256 GB UHS-I EVO+ microSD card, which Samsung said was the highest capacity for a UHS-II microSD card at the time. And then a little over a year later on August 2017, Western Digital unveiled the 400 GB UHS-I SanDisk Ultra microSD card, which was the highest capacity at the time until Integral unveiled the world's first 512 GB UHS-I microSD card on January 2018.

Also, many laptop manufacturers (e.g. Asus, Lenovo, MSI, etc.) have started releasing handheld PCs that also happen to have a microSD card slot. So I wouldn't be surprised if future handheld PCs from these laptop manufacturers start to support microSD Express 7.0 cards in the future, especially at the prices asked for currently for handheld PCs (~$600 to ~$800).

And there's at least one device currently that has a slot for SD Express 7.0 cards (e.g. ThinkPad P16v Gen 1, ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5, etc.). And I'm sure there's at least one person who's willing to pay to be an early adopter of Samsung's SD Express microSD cards.
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I don't know if Samsung would want to see card prices decreasing before launch, as they're the ones selling the cards, so would likely be pretty happy to charge as much as they can, which they'd have the opportunity to if they were the only company manufacturing them. Of course it's possible that Nintendo are working with multiple suppliers for that very reason, and we may see (say) SanDisk cards appearing much closer to launch. In that case Samsung may want to get their product out first just to snag whatever early sales they can.
 
omniryu said:
I Pokémon is pushing forward in that direction if you notice the small details.
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Extremely slowly. Their player count for online stuff is still 4 people, and their gameplay design for online is barely existent. They'll need to overhaul their design and online functions if they want to expand out
 
PS5 to PC ports seem to runs fine from SATA SSDs. I think the importance of HDD speed is not that significant once you are over a certain threshold (and move away from spinning discs). People seems to have little issues running games out of regular SD cards on their Decks. Switch slow loading times are mostly due the CPU. Switch 2 with a dedicated chip for that should not have the same issues. I'm not worried at all about the storage speed, even eMMC should be fine.
 
When I ask Bard to give me the T239 specs, that is what it reply:

"
The Nvidia Tegra T239 is an unannounced processor speculated to be powering the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2. While not officially confirmed by Nvidia, leaks and rumors suggest several key specifications:

  • CPU: 12-core ARM A78AE CPU cores
  • GPU: Custom Ampere architecture with 2048 CUDA cores and 256-bit memory interface
  • Memory: LPDDR5 with 204GB/s bandwidth
From where Gemini took that "leak"?

And a 12-core CPU can compensate the difference of less Hz without increase the energy consumption too much?
 
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ILikeFeet said:
Extremely slowly. Their player count for online stuff is still 4 people, and their gameplay design for online is barely existent. They'll need to overhaul their design and online functions if they want to expand out
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I see that. I do feel like their going to push more for online functionality. I mean Pokémon on the Switch is where I have played their games the longest and that's because of expanded content and online feature like the raid.
 
Danny said:
On twitter everyone is arguing that Switch 2 will be so similar to Switch 1 in architecture that it will be so easy for them to move over into Switch 2 emulation, that seems to be why Nintendo is moving against Yuzu now when they have already lost millions in sales to Yuzu over the entire Switch 1 era. It seems most people think Switch 2 emulation will happen even faster than it did with Switch 1. Making a clean break with Switch seems more logical for Nintendo to be honest, don't make Switch 2 backwards compatible with Switch or you will face the same problem the Switch did with emulation.
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I get where your concern comes from, seeing a whole bunch of people say this or that confidently, if youre not particularly versed in how emulation works. Emulation is typically not a super easy thing, and Yuzu/Ryu were very impressive for how quickly they were running things at decent speed and accuracy.

But generally, this is not how things work and it will take time. Further, while there are certainly plenty of PCs out there that could have the grunt to emulate such a thing, the amount of those compared to to the amount of PCs that can run switch 2 emulation will be a massive gulf in numbers, assuming speculation is generally on point spec wise. As another poster mentioned - that 2013 quad running Yuzu will struggle and choke out on something like this. If you're interested, there's a lot of general info out there about baseline power requirements/floors for emulating hardware. Not everything applies to everything, but for a general sense

Also, just as an aside because it reminds me of someone I should probably check in on - years ago I hired a new employee, super young guy and generally a good employee. But this dude had wierd beliefs and would get worked up about all sorts of zany things. He would just go with whatever the most people believe. Which is crazy. The amount of people who believe in an idea has no bearing on whether it's true or not. Confidently incorrect people on Twitter are wrong about this. Anyway he was like 19 and is over that phase haha
 
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Goodtwin said:
As far as stocking hardware in advance of launch, I would be curious to know how many units Nintendo keeps warehoused at any given time? I would assume this number goes way up prior to the holiday season. Switch manufacturing reportedly started in October of 2016 but we do not know why type of volume Nintendo secured with its manufacturing partners. Lets assume that Nintendo had roughly 3 million units ready to go for launch back in 2017, was that the absolute maximum they could manufacture, or is that the number of units Nintendo ordered for launch? Could they have supplied 6 million units in that time frame if need be?
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Nintendo was making between ~1 and 1.3M units a month at Switch launch and they had ~2M ready for the first month. It was reported that they were looking to ramp up to 2M a month in 2017.

Looking at the 2023 Q3 numbers, you could infer an ability to store around 2M units somewhere in the supply chain, but that's not super useful for a new hardware launch since they cannot really pre-ship to retailers too far in advance.

Instead we could guess how much storage they have in North America. Their distribution center is 380K SqFt and they have around 250 trailer parking spaces.

Let's assume they can store Switch 2 consoles in 1/10th of the square footage. We're making this number up because Nintendo has triple stacked racks for pallets, so whatever square footage is allocated to racks is tripled, but Nintendo doesn't only store consoles, they store games, accessories, and other things and they use the facility to receive and ship. A pallet takes ~13sq ft and you can store say ~400 units per pallet based on the size of the Switch 1 boxes. ~10K Switch 1s fit in a shipping container, or 100 containers per million consoles.

So 380K/13/10 * 400 = 1.2M consoles
250 trailer parking spaces = 2.5M consoles
Meaning a generous max total of ~3.7M consoles for North America w/o having to rent outside storage space.

Does this tell us anything? Not at all, but it was fun to run the numbers again.
 
Hartmann said:
Can he actually be trusted? 🫨
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Not that I trust this in any way since I think it's been confirmed they aren't reliable.

But the Joycons have an IR camera in them, right? If there were a hypothetical camera that could be used docked or handheld, I wonder if that would mean the new controllers have a camera of some type built as well. Could be sorta interesting but I am not creative enough to think of anything fun to do with such a feature.
 
Thraktor said:
It's quite possible that this is for Nintendo, but two things give me a bit of a pause. Firstly, if Switch 2 is launching in March next year, then it would be odd for Samsung to start shipping "custom" microSD Express cards this year, leaving them on the market for months before the only device which supports them launches. It's also a little strange that they've only announced a single capacity. If Switch 2 were launching with a new storage standard, I'd expect there to be enough demand to have a range of capacities available at launch. Having only a single capacity on the market makes me think they might be intended for a product with lower sales expectations, like a drone.
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Reading between the lines, I think the reason they've announced a single capacity is simply because that's the only one they've gotten ready so far, and we'll see 512GB variants a bit later.

But to narrow down what use case these cards might be intended for: The press release only ever mentions read speed with no mention of write speed. Would you take that as hinting towards anything?
 
crazybenjamin said:
Reading between the lines, I think the reason they've announced a single capacity is simply because that's the only one they've gotten ready so far, and we'll see 512GB variants a bit later.

But to narrow down what use case these cards might be intended for: The press release only ever mentions read speed with no mention of write speed. Would you take that as hinting towards anything?
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I don't think it's an intentional hint, but prioritising reads over writes would be what you'd expect for... Say, a gaming device. (I also know I'm not Thraktor and he'd probably have a bit more context on this.)
 
Gingerbread Man said:
You are overestimating the "growing" piracy scene and how much Nintendo is worried about that.
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It isn't so much overestimating it is about perception. It was just pretty much a brag how they* can play Tears of the Kingdom in 4K before the street release. They* were too loud and posting spoilers on the internet. Then they* had the audacity to tag Nintendo. What did you think would happen. Nintendo was going to go after anyone closely related they can find. Unfortunately, it just happen to be Yuzu.

*They meaning the pirates who took the game before the release date and dump it online.
 
It would be nice if they had 2 SD Express microSD compatible slots in the Switch 2, especially if they have backwards compatibility. That way I can use one for Switch 2 games (along with the internal storage), and the other for Switch 1 games with my 1TB card.
 
You know what's kinda funny/weird.

I swear we were getting Switch 2 rumors like every other day until this most recent rumor. Now it's quiet. lol
 
FernandoRocker said:
So, if everything we know about the T239 is true, and the main "secret sauce" is system-wide DLSS for all games, and it being a relatively custom SoC...

Do you think all that would prevent the Switch 2 to be easily emulated from the very beginning?
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My guess is that it will be a massive obstacle, but only for any device without an Nvidia RTX GPU
 
FernandoRocker said:
So, if everything we know about the T239 is true, and the main "secret sauce" is system-wide DLSS for all games, and it being a relatively custom SoC...

Do you think all that would prevent the Switch 2 to be easily emulated from the very beginning?
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I think so. We haven't really gotten PC emulation down for the PS4 or XBO -- I believe the best PS4 emulator right now only has 4 games that are actually playable -- and the Switch 2 is going to be a bit more powerful than those systems. So even ignoring system-level DLSS and other specialized hardware, emulating the successor's titles within the system's lifespan doesn't seem likely outside maybe a few indie titles, and doing so within the first year or two definitely isn't happening.
 
Thraktor said:
Of course it's possible that Nintendo are working with multiple suppliers for that very reason, and we may see (say) SanDisk cards appearing much closer to launch. In that case Samsung may want to get their product out first just to snag whatever early sales they can.
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I do believe that's a real possibility, especially since Nintendo has partnered with SanDisk on Nintendo branded SD cards since the Wii. And considering that SanDisk's the only company selling Nintendo branded SD cards thus far, I believe SanDisk sees no point announcing Nintendo branded microSD Express cards early until Nintendo's new hardware has been officially announced.
BDGAME said:
So, change everything?
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In terms of the type of CPU, GPU, RAM, and internal flash storage, no.

The only thing about the CPU, GPU, and RAM that can be changed with 6 additional months is how high or how low the frequencies are.

And the only thing about the RAM and the internal flash storage that can be changed with 6 additional months is the capacity (i.e. the amount).
 
omniryu said:
It isn't so much overestimating it is about perception. It was just pretty much a brag how they* can play Tears of the Kingdom in 4K before the street release. They* were too loud and posting spoilers on the internet. Then they* had the audacity to tag Nintendo. What did you think would happen. Nintendo was going to go after anyone closely related they can find. Unfortunately, it just happen to be Yuzu.

*They meaning the pirates who took the game before the release date and dump it online.
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There is no happenstance nor misfortune that I would attribute to Yuzu; they actively poked the bear along with extras thrown on top.
 
Thraktor said:
I don't know if Samsung would want to see card prices decreasing before launch, as they're the ones selling the cards, so would likely be pretty happy to charge as much as they can, which they'd have the opportunity to if they were the only company manufacturing them. Of course it's possible that Nintendo are working with multiple suppliers for that very reason, and we may see (say) SanDisk cards appearing much closer to launch. In that case Samsung may want to get their product out first just to snag whatever early sales they can.
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Dakhil said:
I do believe that's a real possibility, especially since Nintendo has partnered with SanDisk on Nintendo branded SD cards since the Wii. And considering that SanDisk's the only company selling Nintendo branded SD cards thus far, I believe SanDisk sees no point announcing Nintendo branded microSD Express cards early until Nintendo's new hardware has been officially announced.
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And before I forget, Nintendo did partner with Panasonic for the GameCube's official SD card adapter.
 
OctoSplattack said:
I think so. We haven't really gotten PC emulation down for the PS4 or XBO -- I believe the best PS4 emulator right now only has 4 games that are actually playable -- and the Switch 2 is going to be a bit more powerful than those systems. So even ignoring system-level DLSS and other specialized hardware, emulating the successor's titles within the system's lifespan doesn't seem likely outside maybe a few indie titles, and doing so within the first year or two definitely isn't happening.
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The difference isn't really in technology, though. There's just way more public interest in emulating Nintendo games than PS or Xbox games, so they get the most R&D. Despite the PS3 and Wii U having similar power, RPCS3 still hasn't gotten a stable release despite having a 4-year headstart over Cemu.
 
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FernandoRocker said:
So, if everything we know about the T239 is true, and the main "secret sauce" is system-wide DLSS for all games, and it being a relatively custom SoC...

Do you think all that would prevent the Switch 2 to be easily emulated from the very beginning?
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system-wide dlss doesn't work. unless you want a ML spatial upscaler or something, which is not what DLSS is

omniryu said:
I see that. I do feel like their going to push more for online functionality. I mean Pokémon on the Switch is where I have played their games the longest and that's because of expanded content and online feature like the raid.
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multiplayer is the area where Pokemon can do a lot of growth from. pushing for more players are more ways to play will shoot the games further up the charts, I think

crazybenjamin said:
Reading between the lines, I think the reason they've announced a single capacity is simply because that's the only one they've gotten ready so far, and we'll see 512GB variants a bit later.

But to narrow down what use case these cards might be intended for: The press release only ever mentions read speed with no mention of write speed. Would you take that as hinting towards anything?
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write performance isn't as important for a gaming device. for downloading games, you're probably limited by your internet connection than your write speeds
 
ILikeFeet said:
multiplayer is the area where Pokemon can do a lot of growth from. pushing for more players are more ways to play will shoot the games further up the charts, I think
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Agreed.
Tentacle-tropes said:
There is no happenstance nor misfortune that I would attribute to Yuzu; they actively poked the bear along with extras thrown on top.
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I get it, they had a part to play, but they were the ones to poke the bear in the eye.
 
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