Taping out doesn't mean the start of full production, but it does mean the start of production samples and testing of physical articles. Even if physical testing is successful, it doesn't automatically follow that production will commence immediately. Full production can wait for production slots or product cycles. Think how Nvidia are rolling out RTX 4000 GPUs - they started with the 4090 last year, then they release a new model every couple of months. Nintendo could easily wait to mass produce T239/Drake, with a short first run to produce engineering samples and populate final dev kits.
They could wait, but there would be little reason for them to sit on a taped out die for a long period of time. I'd be surprised if Nvidia do tape out all dies in a series like Ada at the same time. As they're not required simultaneously, and Nvidia only have a finite number of staff, it would make more sense to stagger them so that they can make more efficient use of the separate teams involved in design, pre-silicon verification, tape out and post-silicon verification, rather than overwork one team at a time while the others are relatively idle.
In any case, from the point of view of a custom chip like T239, it wouldn't make much sense for them to plan for a significant delay after verification is complete. Let's say Nvidia's usual timeframe from tape out to shipping to a customer like Nintendo is a year. If Nintendo wanted to add an extra six month delay in there after verification I'm sure they could, but this would mean taping out six months earlier. That's six months you can't spend making any changes to the SoC, and it's six months you can't spend re-evaluating your plans for the system. Intentionally taping out early would just reduce both Nintendo and Nvidia's flexibility, without any significant benefit. Of course this doesn't preclude the possibility that they decided
after tape-out that they would delay manufacturing.
My assumption is that the various specifics of T239, from its design to when and how it's manufactured, would have been subject to two separate contracts signed between Nintendo and Nvidia. The first of these would have been signed in late 2019 or early 2020, and would have involved Nvidia designing the SoC and developing the SDKs/APIs/etc. necessary to develop software for the SoC. The second contract would be signed when the design of the SoC is effectively complete, and would trigger the tape out, verification and manufacturing of the SoC. This would also likely define the per-unit pricing, delivery quantity and approximate delivery dates of at least the initial shipments of the chip. Based on what we've seen from LinkedIn profiles and Linux commit messages, I presume that this contract was signed in early 2022.
What I'm getting at is that, prior to the signing of the second contract, Nintendo have complete flexibility. They can request changes to the design, they can delay, and they can even consider different vendors and/or cancel the project entirely. After signing the second contract, they have almost no flexibility. The chip design is locked in, the price is locked in, and there's likely a minimum order of 10+ million units locked in too. They might have some flexibility on the delivery dates, but only to a limited degree. Part of the reason AMD and Nvidia like selling chips into the console space is that, although it's relatively low margin business, it's a very reliable and predictable source of revenue. Console makers put in orders in large quantities far ahead of delivery, which they're locked into, which simplifies planning and logistics for the likes of AMD and Nvidia compared to their much more volatile PC parts businesses. If Nintendo were to delay delivery after signing the second contract, it's possible that Nvidia would simply still enter full scale manufacturing at the same time (because they've pre-paid for the wafer allocation) and charge Nintendo storage costs until they make delivery. That is, while they wouldn't be prevented from delaying at that point, it would cost them money to do so.
Based on the above, it seems likely to me that, in early 2022 Nintendo were confident enough to give their go-ahead for tape out and manufacturing. I think it's reasonable to assume that, at that time, release was planned for 2023, presumably late in the year. Note that this is already a much longer time period between tape out and release compared to Nvidia's desktop cards. The AD102 die in the 4090
was reportedly taped out in February last year and launched in October, an 8 month delay, compared to a perhaps 18 month delay being planned here. I would guess that a console SoC is going to be more conservatively timed to prevent delays (eg if a flaw was found during verification), and Nintendo would likely require a relatively large stockpile before launching, unlike GPUs, which often launch with very little availability.
It is entirely possible that Nintendo would still delay the console after they signed the second contract, even if it cost them to do so. We saw with the Switch Nintendo delayed by a few months to give more time for their launch titles to be completed, even though it caused them to miss the holiday season, and in retrospect it was the right call. If let's say a new 3D Mario game were planned as their major launch exclusive for [redacted], and they had to choose between releasing it in a state they weren't happy with, or not releasing it at launch, or just pushing back the console launch altogether, I could see them pushing back the console launch.
Especially since that OLED has been in stock for a lot of months now
