Nintendo Switch

[MayImilae]

*just woke up and is all caught up on eurogamer coverage*

Everything makes sense, really, so I'm pretty sure this leak is accurate. It's a Tegra X1! So shocking. I was definitely a little disappointed in the clockspeed reductions while docked. But as eurogamer explained, by lowering the clocks it is keeping thermals super stable so it never throttles. Not to mention it drops the power requirements quite a bit too. It makes sense. And still way stronger than a Wii U, so, eh.

As for the clockspeed while undocked, it completely makes sense. 1080p is 250% more pixels than 720p. 40 times 2.5 = 100! Simple.

So anyway, none of this is all that surprising, the Tegra X1 has been the center of the rumors for some time. I know some people were wanting the Switch to compete with the PS4 while being $200 while being a portable with 10 hours of battery life, but, that is really silly. This is still much more powerful than the Wii U, and it's a portable. You can think of it as a console that is much stronger than last gen but not current gen performance, and/or as the strongest portable console that has ever been made. Either way, it's a big leap for Nintendo.

Btw, even though it is maxwell, I'd like to point out that it's more complicated than that. As eurogamer explained, the Shield Android TV is (Maxwell Gen 2) and integrates a lot of features that weren't in Maxwell desktop GPUs but did end up in Pascal cards. Maxwell is very similar to Pascal after all, so a lot of these newer features could be added with Nintendo's customization. So don't get too fussy about the difference in architectures. The main difference between Maxwell and Pascal was the 16nm FINFET process, which allowed it to reach much higher clockspeeds with reasonable thermals. From the clockspeeds it is likely 20nm, or it could be 16nm and just super cool and quiet. We'll see which it is in time.