Somehow, there is new rumors and speculation about the Switch 2, but this is only possible because the console hasn’t reached the public’s hands yet.
YouTuber Geekerwan claims they got their hands on a Switch 2 motherboard. He says he found a listing for the motherboard on a Chinese ebay-like online bidding marketplace. He was himself skeptical, but was convinced after making a visual comparison with how Switch motherboards look.
When Geekerwan received the motherboard, he confirmed that it couldn’t boot. He speculates that it could be an unfinished sample, or a defective reject from a factory. These are credible explanations for how such a motherboard could come up online, but we would argue that there’s a possibility that they were sold a fake built from real parts as well.
There’s some interesting things about what Geekerwan found from this motherboard, and somehow he had access to specialized equipment – even the high magnification microscopes needed to see the markings identifying the SOC components! But we would want our readers to keep in mind that this could all be debunked as easily as it went viral in a month’s time.
Geekerwan mainly confirmed two things: one, that much of the rumors about the console’s components from months ago are true. This was information mainly collected by Famiboards users including, but not limited to, LiC and darthdiablo. They and others, some of whom have deliberately stayed off radar, have been doing datamining, including gathering information from a certain Hosiden factory.
The information Geekerwan corroborates includes the Switch 2’s SOC being called the T239, and that it is an 8 core SOC with 4 MB Level 3 cache. He also confirmed other components that Famiboards users identified, including the UFS reader, Bluetooth and audio components, etc. Now, what we want to emphasize here is that Geekerwan didn’t see another list that matches the list Famiboards collected from a month ago. He saw the physical parts in the motherboard and identified each one.
The other big discovery, however, relates to the curious particulars that were rumored but not confirmed by Famiboards. He took a close look at the Switch 2’s GPU, and on the surface, it is very similar to an RTX 30 Series GPU. These GPUs date to 2020, using Samsung’s 8nm process, and fall under the generation of Ampere architecture.
However, upon taking a closer look, things are a little different. The GPU has six Texture Processing Clusters (TPCs) and combined 1536 Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) cores. Unlike Ampere GPUs, two of the six TPCs were physically placed separately from the other four TPCs. This arrangement could allow the Switch 2 to have more efficient use of its memory, as its memory bandwidth could be partitioned to different uses. This is a feature of Lovelace architecture.
But therein lies the rub. Nvidia’s Lovelace architecture components aren’t made using Samsung’s 8nm process, but with Samsung’s rival TSMC. TSMC’s custom 4N process is more efficient than Samsung’s, and they’re currently the only company that can make these chips. So Geekerwan has come to the conclusion that the Switch 2’s hardware is really a hybrid of Lovelace and Ampere components. This lines up with some rumors that the Switch 2 is mostly Ampere but will get some features from Lovelace to boost its performance. Once again, Geekerwan’s insight comes from his physical inspection and identification of the parts themselves.
Geekerwan also provided an estimated performance using equivalent parts, but we shouldn’t take this too seriously and consider it for fun. As he explained, he can’t really accurately predict the Switch 2’s performance, and even such accurate tests can’t account for specialized programming developers can do to port their games.
If Geekerwan’s motherboard is real and everything lines up with the final product, the rumors about the Switch 2’s parts from last year are true. And it also adds weight to theories that the Switch 2 should have launched earlier. Given that Nintendo still can’t meet the overwhelming demand for the console, maybe they couldn’t have helped having this delay.
We’ll find out soon enough how real this all is, but if you’re interested to see it yourself, you can watch Geekerwan’s video below.
