Of course, Macronix's 192-layer 3D NAND also seems to be targeted at Nintendo.
記憶體廠旺宏 (2337-TW) 今(25)日召開法說，董事長吳敏求表示，營運最壞時刻已過，第二季在車用、醫療及工控三大應用驅動下，將力拚轉盈。
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This is a curious one as, to my knowledge, Nintendo haven't used Macronix's NAND in any of their consoles. They're one of Macronix's biggest customers, but that's for XtraROM used in game cards, and
it's not NAND. Looking at teardowns of Switch, 3DS and Wii U, they're all using eMMC from either Samsung or Toshiba (now Kioxia). Macronix doesn't really compete in that market either, as the only eMMC products they have are specialised automotive/industrial parts maxing out at 8GB, and they don't make the UFS which Nintendo will presumably be using in the Switch NG.
My guess is that either the Macronix Chairman is being a bit over-ambitious in expecting that he can leverage their relationship with Nintendo to also start selling them NAND, or he's not talking about Nintendo. Sony's use of a custom SSD setup in the PS5 means they need to buy raw NAND, which is more in Macronix's wheelhouse, if they can compete on price with the major NAND suppliers.
Edit: Actually, there's one unlikely possibility that I'm not considering here, which is that Nintendo would actually have a custom flash controller themselves, and use raw NAND on Switch NG. Not having a separate flash controller chip like Sony, but rather integrating the flash controller onto the SoC like Apple. Apple design their own NVMe flash controllers and integrate them onto their SoCs. There are a few reasons for this (eg removing additional parts they would need to buy or manufacture), but one of the main benefits of this is power efficiency. Most modern NVMe controllers are manufactured on a 12nm process, but Apple's NVMe controllers, by virtue of being on the same die as the rest of the SoC, are manufactured on TSMC 4nm, and will be on 3nm by the end of the year. They also remove the physical PCIe link, which presumably saves some additional power.
So, hypothetically, if Nintendo wanted the most power efficient storage option possible, the Apple style approach of building the controller into the SoC would probably be it. Of course, the problem is that Nvidia have zero experience with flash controllers. Apple spent years building up its expertise in SSD controllers (including spending
hundreds of millions on acquisitions), which is a worthwhile investment when they're a hardware company which can use those controllers in almost every device they sell. It's not really worth Nvidia building up that level of expertise from scratch for a single chip, although they could probably license flash controller IP from somewhere. It's also an odd thing for Nintendo and Nvidia to focus on, given UFS is abundant, cheap and should easily hit Nintendo's performance and power consumption requirements. Finally there's no reference to it anywhere in any of the Linux code concerning T239, which I would expect to be the case if they had any additional custom hardware like that (like we saw with the FDE).
