The Nintendo Switch 2 has been in the spotlight once again after a recent leak showed its possible final form. We know that the said console will use NVIDIA’s new Tegra SoC, and we’re pretty clear about its possible final specs, but what we didn’t know is that AMD tried to take NVIDIA’s position.

Moore’s Law is Dead assures that AMD tried to gain a foothold in Nintendo’s new console, and that it did so with great force. NVIDIA didn’t make it easy, meaning they offered very competitive APUs in performance, efficiency and price, but in the end the big N decided on NVIDIA.

He doesn’t go into technical details, but the source leaves us with a very important piece of information that was ultimately key for NVIDIA to win the contract to design the Nintendo Switch 2 SoC, and that is that the green giant’s solution offered excellent performance for this AMD using 5 watt mode.

The 5 watt mode could be what the Nintendo Switch 2 uses by default in portable pro mode maximize battery life. I’m convinced that this victory of NVIDIA with such a low power consumption was largely due to the CPU that uses the ARM architecture, while AMD uses the x64 architecture in its APUs.

In dock mode, it is very likely that the Nintendo Switch 2 will reach much higher values. It will all depend on the cooling system, but I would bet between 15 watts and 30 watts. This would greatly improve docked performance and could make this console a much more competitive and interesting system.

Nintendo Switch 2: Ampere architecture with an Ada twist

Nintendo’s console will use a low-power integrated GPU based on the Ampere architecture. NVIDIA offered the Japanese company the option of using an Ada Lovelace-based GPU manufactured on a 4nm node, but Nintendo preferred an Ampere-based option. in the matter of costs.

SoCs with Ampere-based GPUs cost Nintendo a lot less money Samsung 8nm node makes it possible to further reduce the manufacturing cost of this chip while maintaining a high success rate on the wafer, as it is a node that is fully mature. However, to improve the efficiency of Ampere, this GPU includes some exclusive features of Ada Lovelace and also has other improvements that make it a hybrid between the two architectures.

The Nintendo Switch 2 SoC is essentially a price-optimized version of the Tegra Orin and adapted to the particularities of a portable console. Its specifications have not yet been confirmed, but the most reliable data I have now says that this GPU will have between 1,280 and 1,536 shaders, it will work less than 1 GHz in portable mode (5 watt mode) and will support NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction.