After multiple leaks, speculations and rumours, Nintendo has officially released the hardware specifications for the Nintendo Switch 2. Digital Foundry has given us an in-depth breakdown of the main components inside, explaining just what kind of performance we can expect from the CPU, GPU and RAM modules in Nintendo’s latest handheld phenomenon.
Let’s start with the custom Nvidia chip that runs it all.
The Switch 1 was said to have a custom Nvidia Tegra X1, but we now know that the chip was vanilla. The Switch 2, however, does seem to have a device-specific chip built to handle all the new hardware-intensive games of the current decade.
Digital Foundry says the CPU will be an ARM Cortex A78C, running the ARMv8 64-bit instruction set. It will have a 64K L1 instruction cache and a 64K L1 data cache. Each of the eight cores will feature a 256K L2 cache and share 4MB of L3 cache. These larger caches, compared to the Switch 1, will ensure faster operating times for software on the device.
Of the eight cores, two are reserved for the device’s OS, while the other six are available for developers to use for the games and apps. Clock speeds are an interesting one, too. In handheld mode, we can expect around 1000MHz; in docked mode, this drops to around 900MHz. Digital Foundry presumes this is because, in handheld mode, the memory bandwidth drops from 102 GB/s to 68 GB/s, so the CPU takes over some of the control here.
| Switch 2 | Switch 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU Architecture | 8x ARM Cortex A78C | 4x ARM Cortex A57 |
| CPU Clocks | 998MHz (docked), 1101MHz (mobile), Max 1.7GHz | 1020 MHz (docked/mobile), Max 1.785GHz |
| CPU System Reservation | 2 cores (6 available to developers) | 1 core (3 available to developers) |
On to the GPU, the Switch 2 will feature Nvidia’s Ampere architecture. This is the same architecture as in Nvidia’s RTX 30 series cards. This gives developers access to Ray Tracing, DLSS, and up to 3.072 TFLOPs of power when running in docked mode. Of course, developers must tune their games to maximise GPU usage while maintaining stable memory bandwidth usage, for their games to really shine.
| Switch 2 | Switch 1 | |
| GPU Architecture | Ampere | Maxwell |
| CUDA Cores | 1536 | 256 |
| GPU Clocks | 1007MHz (docked), 561MHz (mobile), Max 1.4GHz | 768MHz (docked), up to 460MHz (mobile), Max 921MHz |
The Switch 2 comes with 12 GB of LPDDR5X split between two 6 GB modules. As stated above, memory bandwidth will be 102 GB/s in docked mode and 68 GB/s in handheld. What is interesting to note here is that the system has reserved 3GB of memory, giving developers access to 9 GB, three times more than they had access to on the Switch 1.
| Switch 2 | Switch 1 | |
| Memory/Interface | 128-bit/LPDDR5 | 64-bit/LPDDR4 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 102GB/s (docked), 68GB/s (mobile) | 25.6GB/s (docked), 21.3GB/s (mobile) |
| Memory System Reservation | 3GB (9GB available for games) | 0.8GB (3.2GB available for games) |
Overall, the specs are certainly an upgrade compared to the older Switch 1. With the magic that console has already delivered over the past almost-decade, I’m excited to see what new things developers come up with on Nintendo’s latest platform.
