Teardowns confirm Nintendo Switch is built on standard Tegra X1 processor

Ever since Nintendo announced the Switch, it’s been cagey about the exact details of the platform. That’s nothing new for the company, which frequently goes out of its way to obfuscate its own hardware’s capabilities. But there’s been some question as to whether the Switch contained a bog standard Tegra chip, or if there was something a little more exciting inside it. Doing custom work on a chip is also nothing new for Nintendo; the Wii U had an unusual custom triple-core processor with an asymmetric L2 cache, alongside on-die eDRAM and its ability to stream video from the console to the gamepad.

In this case, Tech Insights tore down the Switch and confirmed the SoC inside the handheld gaming system is an Nvidia Tegra T210 with a Maxwell-derived GM20B GPU. Whatever custom work Nvidia and Nintendo were referring to having performed, it wasn’t done on the SoC. Of course, they could be referring to other aspects of the system and its software, but the SoC itself is a standard Tegra chip. Eurogamer notes that the Tegra X1 inside the Switch offers far more consistent performance when playing Zelda in 720p than it can manage in Android when running the 2013 Tomb Raider port, despite roughly the same detail levels and lower clocks on the Switch. This type of customization may be what Nintendo had in mind, and it certainly seems to have delivered.

The T210 in all its glory.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using off-the-shelf components for the Switch, and Nvidia’s Tegra X1 family is still considered one of the best and fastest overall tablet processors you can buy today, despite dating back to 2015. But it also opens the door to the possibility that this iteration of the Switch, like the PS4 Pro and the upcoming Xbox One Scorpio, might see a mid-life upgrade rather than keeping the same hardware for 5-7 years. A shift to Pascal (or a later part) would give Nvidia substantial room to raise clocks or improve performance without harming battery life on the Switch. It would also put an end to persistent claims that the Switch is basically a modest improvement on the Wii U in a much smaller form factor, rather than any kind of game-changer in its own right.

Tech Insights also notes that the Switch’s storage chips are attached to a removable board, implying that Nintendo could swap them out for higher capacity versions with relatively little effort. It’s not crazy to think we could see a New Switch in three or four years with at least 64GB of on-board memory, and hopefully a faster SoC as well.