In the past, Digital Foundry theorized that the NVIDIA-designed Tegra T239 will be an 8 nanometer part—rumored to be built on Samsung 8 nm DUV foundry node. Newer gaming community-generated proposals have suggested a shift to Samsung’s 5 nm EUV node—mostly based on the chipset’s physical footprint. In sharp contrast, the Digital Foundry guys are sticking with their 8 nm theory.
If Digital Foundry is correct, then Nintendo is using a node from around ~5 years ago. Nvidia’s 3000 series were fabbed on Samsung’s 8 nm node.
isn’t the GPU Ampere? aka 3000 series, which was 8nm as you say
would be kinda crazy if both the arch and the node are so old, I’m really hoping for a decent new Shield TV…
but the current Shield TV is Maxwell and 16nm lol so anything would be an upgrade at this point
It’s a very Nintendo move to use an old crusty node for cost cutting. The switch launched with an already 2 year old SOC built on the TSMC 20nm node which was already at least 1 node behind. And since then cost per mm^2 has skyrocketed. Maybe Samsungs 8nm is cheap at this point?
My concern is that Samsungs 8nm node was kind ass compared to TSMC. Outside of raytracing AMD was able to meet or exceed Nvidia’s performance pet watt because it was so ass. I had an RTX 3080 powered laptop and that GPU sucks down no less than 20 watts when activated even when not doing anything. Unless it scales really well at lower clock speeds I’m not having high hopes for the battery life of the switch 2. But hey it gives them a route to sell an upgraded Switch 2 2 in a few years and the gamers will slurp it up.
I think… 5 nm doesn’t make a lot of sense here, unfortunately. NVIDIA GPUs have never been on TSMC N5, and I don’t think they’ve used any Samsung process newer than 8 nm.
