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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't really tell us anything. It's a lot easier to port an engine vs writing a new one from scratch, especially if the new system is also just an ARM64 processor with an NVIDIA GPU.

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Does Nvidia still make mobile GPUs? Tegra was a flop afaik, which is why Nintendo picked it, since they could buy whole container ships of them for cheap.

What’s a relatively modern SOC that sold poorly and was manufactured in large volumes? That’s probably what the next Nintedo console will use.

My ideal (new) Switch 2 (U) would be taking advantage of AMDs mobile APUs but I think they're hamstrung with backwards ARM compatibility with how good the Switches library is.

If everything’s built against an abstracted SDK, they could have games ported over with just a recompile potentially. If the new system is much higher performance then any optimizations against ARM would be a non issue. If they allow lower level access to the hardware, it would be a lot harder, but you could conceivably implement a GPU emulation at the hardware layer. Or depending on costs, just include the entire SOC for the compatibility mode, like PS3 did for PS2.

I think if they want to keep the form factor they need the higher performance per watt that arm cores can offer.

They make desktop-class mobile gpu's, but nothing like the switch. However, they do still make embedded dev kits (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...), with their newest ones running on ampere.

The Jetson nano is the same chip as the nintendo switch, with half the cuda cores iirc.

Nvidia is believed to be developing a custom mobile GPU for Nintendo's next console.

They posted a job ad in 2022 saying "looking to hire a deeply technical, creative and hands-on software engineer to pioneer the next generation of Graphics Developer Tools for Game Consoles"

Nvidia's only game console client is Nintendo.

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