Nintendo’s highly anticipated Switch 2 mobile gaming console is expected to be announced before April of 2025. We’ve heard and have seen various leaks with different SoC’s mentioned that could power the console, but it seems like AMD has lost the bid for the console. The main reason for this is concerns over battery life.
Reported by Moore’s Law is Dead, AMD was definitely in the running to power the Switch 2, but ended up loosing the bid. Apparently AMD was shooting for 15W in handheld mode to offer better next-gen gaming performance, but Nintendo was more concerned with battery life. On top of that they did not want to pack in a larger battery, which would make the handheld a bit clunky.
It seems as if Nintendo will go the NVIDIA route, with the Tegra T239 being the likely chip to power the console. It offers the same level of performance of what AMD was offering, but better efficiency. This chip also costs less to manufacture so this will keep costs down for Nintendo. The NVIDIA Tegra T239 SoC makes use of an 8-core Arm A78C cluster with modified NVIDIA Ampere cores. This gives it features like DLSS and AV1 encoding. There are a total of 1536 CUDA cores with 128-bit LPDDR5 memory that runs at 102 GB/s bandwidth.
When it comes to the battery on the Switch 2 it is likely to feature a 20-Wh battery, which is 4-Wh more than their current OLED model. If the Tegra T239 is really as efficient as stated, we could see a nice bump in battery life for the Switch 2.
Via NotebookCheck
