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A new video from the ever effusive Geekerwan has damaged down the particulars of the silicon at the coronary heart of the Nintendo Switch 2. He picked up a bricked console motherboard for 1,000 Yuan (approx. $140) from a Chinese language eBay analogue, Xianyu, and has completely gone to city on the chip.
Like, above and past.
I completely advocate you watch the video, as a result of in addition to being extremely detailed on the extent they went to so as to get the full particulars of the chip—together with reducing it down the center with a very skinny ion beam so as to measure a cross-section to verify the course of node—he is super-engaging and all the time captivated with what he’d protecting. It is a pleasure, actually.
In any case, the fundamental takeaway is that sure, this is the Nvidia T239 chip that was broadly rumoured to be the chip powering the new Nintendo handheld, and you’ll be able to see from the steel layer inscription that this was a processor taped out in 2021. Geekerwan notes that this four-year hole is a very very long time between tape out and launch, and probably hints at a Switch 2 that was supposed to be launched a whereas again and was postponed for no matter purpose.
It is Nintendo; the purpose may very well be something.
As a result of it’s an already damaged chip—they tried powering it on, however obtained nowhere—there was nothing stopping them from ripping the Nvidia chip open to see what was happening beneath the brand’d heatspreader. Lapping the high meant they might get a nice die shot, highlighting that whereas this does certainly home Ampere-generation Nvidia {hardware}, “this Ampere isn’t the different Ampere.”
There are particular variations between an RTX 30-series die and the format of the GPU part in the T239 chip. Geekerwan notes that the SM design truly appears far nearer to the format of an Ada SM than an Ampere one, which might recommend that there are some components shared between the GPU generations on this chip.
There are 12 SMs on this board, with 128 CUDA cores in every, for a complete of 1536 cores. That is what the rumours had already stated, in order that’s not a shock right here.
One other factor which appears to straddle two generations is the course of node itself. Theoretically, it’s a Samsung 8N node, however their examination suggests this is a manufacturing course of that shares options of each Samsung’s 10 nm and 8 nm nodes. That is, nonetheless, a customized course of, in order that does make sense.
With the GPU elements unusually wrapped around it, there’s the CPU section. That is made up of eight Arm A78C cores, every with 256 kB L2 cache, with a shared 4 MB of L3 in the center.
In addition to ripping the wrapping layers off this silicon current, Geekerwan has additionally made an try at making an attempt to dial into the potential performance of the Switch 2’s core. With a equally Ampere-based GPU, the GA107 of the RTX 2050 laptop computer chip is the closest match, although that comes with a far larger TGP and reminiscence and core clocks.
So as to strive and get a bead on gaming performance, they hobbled their RTX 2050 laptop computer as greatest they might to match the rumoured handheld frequency of the Switch 2—421 MHz—and halved the reminiscence clock. To get that low, they wanted to make use of inner instruments to carry the goal TGP and frequencies proper down.
Taking 3DMark Metal Nomad Gentle as their GPU check, you’ll be able to see that in handheld mode, the Switch 2 truly has a related stage of performance as the Steam Deck, with the docked mode simulating 53% larger performance than Valve’s basic handheld.
Although it’s value noting that even in docked mode, it cannot contact the Radeon 780M, which powers most of the remainder of the handheld gaming PCs on the market.
One factor they do observe, nonetheless, is that whereas there’s a important distinction between the authentic Switch chip and the theoretical performance of the new one, it’s not the 10x that Nvidia has been touting. No less than not with out DLSS, and possibly even Body Gen. Do not forget that we stated there have been similarities between the Ampere GPU in the T239 and the Ada design?
Geekerwan then goes on to present a simulated Cyberpunk 2077 run at the anticipated DLSS ranges that a Switch 2 model, in each handheld and docked mode, may ship. And, nicely, it’s not dangerous, particularly while you assume it’ll be on a comparatively wee display screen. He did activate path tracing, too, however the much less stated about that the higher.
The identical goes for Monster Hunter Wilds the place he says, “even should you run 720p, low-definition, super-performance DLSS in dock mode, it turns into a shitty wilderness.” Although Black Fable Wukong would not look dangerous, and the newest CoD additionally runs fairly nicely on this simulated {hardware}.
As you may count on, it’s the CPU part that’s approach behind the GPU half. The Arm cores run at 1.1 GHz, and in a Geekbench 6 evaluation, that places the simulated performance 140% behind the Steam Deck APU’s single-core performance and 52% behind on multi-core metrics.
It is a actually attention-grabbing breakdown of the Switch 2’s potential performance, and a nice look at the precise silicon, too. And, once more, I say go watch the video, this man’s nice.
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