Nintendo Switch 2 PCB Leak Reveals an NVIDIA Tegra T239 Chip Optically Shrunk to 5nm

The Nintendo Switch 2 is shaping up to be a big (albeit small) gaming platform launch this year. It competes with the growing ecosystem of portable x86-64 mobile devices running Windows. Its main goal should be to offer a similar or better gaming experience but with better battery life, given that all its hardware is purpose-built. for a portable console and uses a highly optimized software stack; and the SoC is a big part of that. Nintendo approached NVIDIA for the job given its leadership in IP graphics and its ability to integrate it with Arm’s IP processor in a semi-custom chip. Someone with access to the Switch 2 prototype, likely an independent software vendor, took the device apart, revealing the chip, a smaller version of the 2023 Tegra T239.

It’s important to note that console prototypes are not physically similar to the final product, they are simply created so that independent software vendors and game developers can test them and, together with “official” PC-based emulation, provide the ability to develop or port games to a new platform. The Switch 2 is very similar to the original Switch: it’s a large tablet-like device with detachable controllers. The largest chip on the motherboard is NVIDIA Tegra T239. Nintendo Prime has shared more details about the chip.

NVIDIA originally built the T239 on Samsung’s 8nm DUV foundry node, but the semi-custom chip powering the Switch 2 is likely built on Samsung’s 5nm EUV node. This node delivers a 70% increase in transistor density over 8nm, and Nintendo Prime estimates that the chip in the picture is about that much smaller than the 341mm² die area that an NVIDIA Orin would have with 2/3 CPU cores and an iGPU. Number of CM. The size of the crystal in the photographs is estimated to be approximately 200 mm².

The T239 features a three-tier APU consisting of one Arm Cortex X1 HP core, three Cortex A78 P cores and four Cortex A55 E cores, as well as an Arm DynamIQ hardware scheduler. The iGPU T239 is based on the Ampere graphics architecture with 12 stream multiprocessors and 1536 CUDA cores. On the Switch 2, this chip manages 12GB of LPDDR5X-7500 memory. The console uses a 256 GB flash drive based on UFS 3.1.

As for the device itself, the Switch 2 prototype measures 270 x 116 x 14mm (WxDxH), which is noticeably larger than the Switch OLED’s 242 x 102 x 13.9mm. Its display is also larger: 8 inches compared to its predecessor’s 7 inches. Nintendo has likely taken the opportunity to update the Switch 2’s suite of communications features.