We have a new rumor about the Switch 2’s potential power, that is mindblowing, but also has a somewhat amusing caveat.
On the latest episode of the Broken Silicon podcast, YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead was joined by ThePhawx to discuss various news surrounding gaming, particularly from the CPU and GPU side of the technology. Some of their conversation about the Nintendo Switch 2 was speculatory, and there was also some talk of the first Switch, but Moore’s Law is Dead has new rumors to share.
What he has heard is that developers are targeting the console to run at 4 Teraflops Ampere while it’s docked. While that’s not high compared to what can be built for high end PC gaming computers, this is definitely more than what gamers, even Nintendo fans, would think that they need.
To put this in perspective, Moore’s Law is Dead did cite older rumors of the T239 chip running the console. He cited that it isn’t expected to perform any better than an RTX 2050, which is a GPU from 2021. But, as he and other sources have also explained, Nvidia is packing a lot of bespoke technology into the custom chip for the Switch 2, so it can make use of newer technology.
We should also explain, teraflops are a way to gauge a device’s power, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. There are other factors that come in to determine how much performance a device will have, and that’s where we get to the second half of this rumor.
Moore’s Law is Dead also said that Nintendo intends to drop the clock on the Switch 2 severely while it’s undocked. When he clarified, he was told that it would not be at 800Mhz, which is low enough as it is, but even lower than that.
This was where he and ThePhawx did get into some speculation on what this new information means. Moore’s Law is Dead believes that Nintendo will target power consumption of 5 watts or less.
He then explains that if he were Nintendo, what he would do is create a fanless, passive heatsink tablet design for the console, and then put a 30 watt fan on the dock. In this way, the Switch 2 would still be a low heat, child friendly console when held in the hands, and it would have the power to run something like the Unreal 5 Matrix demo on a dock.
No one seems to believe that Nintendo is planning other technology tricks, such as putting a GPU on the dock itself, making it indispensable to more hardcore gamers. But if this rumor is true, it sounds like Nintendo will have cobbled together enough things to not only make impressive new original first party games, but enable third party developers to make ports of current generation games on the Switch 2.
It certainly sounds like games like Hi-Fi Rush and Baldur’s Gate 3 could make its way to the platform, but they won’t be any good unless you play on the dock. But as always, we will have to wait and see for when Nintendo reveals their plans, which may take as soon as the next financial call next week.
