X Kurnarl, a user known for technical chip analyzes, and YouTube reviewer Geekerwan purchased and analyzed the chip Nintendo Switch 2 consoles.
Enthusiasts were able to purchase a board for a new Nintendo console on the second-hand market in China. Unreleased AMD and Intel processors, including early engineering samples, often appear on this platform. The cost of the board with the chip installed was only about $138.
However, the board does not work. It can be turned on, but the image is not displayed. Probably, this defective equipment was intended for disposal, but apparently was not destroyed. However, this material is enough for analysis.
Researchers have confirmed the use of the NVIDIA T239 processor with Ampere GPU (1536 CUDA cores) in the Nintendo Switch 2. The use of this chip in Nintendo products was first reported by a reliable NVIDIA insider Kopite7kimi. Now Geekerwan has published a detailed analysis of the processor, image of the printed circuit board and performance simulation data.
The SoC was manufactured in week 36 of 2024, so despite its rather old architecture, the processor can be considered relatively new. The board also contains two 6GB Hynix LPDDR5 chips on a 128-bit bus with a bandwidth of 8533 MT/s. However, the Switch 2 series is expected to operate at lower speeds. A comparison of the boards of previous and new consoles has also been published. The video has English subtitles.
Kurnarl has published a high-resolution image of the crystal, which is available in high resolution. It confirms the layout and markings of the processor, the presence of 8 ARM Cortex-A78C cores, 4 MB of L2 cache and an NVIDIA Ampere GPU with 1536 CUDA cores. The total area of the crystal is 207 mm², which is about twice as large as the Tegra X1 and close to the GA107 GPU.
The world’s first Nintendo Switch 2 Dieshot
Samsung 8N
8Core A78C,Share 4M L2
1536Cuda/6TPC ampere GPUA detailed process and chip analysis report will be released on Youtube and Bili at 9:30 pm tomorrow.
High-resolution photos in Telegram group:https://t.co/MI6oCa2yOA pic.twitter.com/tEnMZ2kIqG
— Kurnal (@Kurnalsalts) May 7, 2025
Geekerwan conducted a simulation using an RTX 2050 graphics card with the same architecture. However, since the exact clock speeds are unknown, this comparison cannot be considered accurate enough. The simulations show that the Switch 2 can deliver GTX 1050 Ti level performance with DLSS in docked mode and GTX 750 Ti level performance in portable mode. That’s about 7 times faster than the Tegra X1 chip in the original Switch, but not 10 times faster as NVIDIA once claimed.
Source: VideoCardz
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