We have an interesting new rumor about some future proofing that Nintendo may be planning for the Switch 2.
As shared by SuperMetalDave64 on his latest YouTube video, he has found a job opening that he believes confirms earlier rumors about the console. Nintendo of America is looking for an Electro-Mechanical Engineer, to work at their home office in Redmond Washington.
Nintendo has listed these as part of their requirements:
- Experience with transmission line theory and how it constrains practical PCB design. Please highlight any trainings or experience in this area on your application.
- Experience with high speed signaling and power delivery on PCB designs that contain elements such as PCIE, DDR4, MIPI, SD/SD Express.
- Expert knowledge of IPC standards and design for manufacturing best practices for printed circuit board design.
For those who don’t know, transmission line theory is the guiding principle for how electromagnetic waves, such as electric power, can cross lines. It’s the reason every gadget in your home works, it’s why we have electricity in our homes, and it’s why Glen Campbell was the greatest country guitarist who ever lived.
SuperMetalDave64 points to these as hints that Nintendo needs someone to add new features to the Switch 2. To be specific, he believes Nintendo wants to optimize the Switch 2’s performance using Samsung’s upcoming new microSD standard, SD Express.
In fact, WCCFTech openly speculated that Samsung worked with Nintendo to make the SD Express standard, when Samsung first announced it last September. WCCFTech and SuperMetalDave64 are really excited about this, because Samsung claims that these new cards can reach transfer speeds of 800 MB/S. But that really isn’t enough information for most of us, is it. Why would Nintendo go through the effort over a card that you can’t even buy yet?
As you may know, newer games have such higher requirements that developers are telling gamers that they need to upgrade their HDDs to SSDs. While a HDD on a PC could run on SATA at a maximum speed of 600 MB/S, an SSD could reach speeds of 3,000 MB/S. And yes, new games are being programmed in such a way that they take advantage of these newer speeds.
While 800 MB/S isn’t quite catching up to SSDs, it’s far better than the average standard microSD speed of 60 MB/S, which is the theoretical speed of the Nintendo branded SanDisk microSD cards. In fact, the best microSD card you can use on your Nintendo Switch now, this 1.5 TB SanDisk SDXC card, claims a maximum transfer speed of 150 MB/S.
If you’re wondering why Nintendo is putting in so much effort on such weak technology, then you need to be acquainted on how Nintendo sees tech. The reason they beat out competitors like Sega and Sony on portable gaming is their prioritizing of power efficiency over performance, so that gamers can enjoy longer gameplay experiences.
Even as the Nintendo Switch boasts power at a scale Gunpei Yokoi could have barely imagined was possible, it was still designed with many of Yokoi’s design principles in mind. As this NintendoSwitch subreddit explains, the Switch has the best performance per watt, of not only modern day consoles, but of any console ever made.
And we have already seen how Nintendo, with help from Nvidia, has leveraged the Switch to overperform with impossible ports of games like Doom Eternal and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Nintendo wants to do those things on the Switch 2. The UFS storage rumored to be in the internal memory should be able to do that, but Nintendo wants to extend that to any expandable memory options that will be available in the future too.
On a personal level, I kinda wished that Nintendo snuck in some NVME M.2 slot on that Switch 2, but maybe the Switch 2 hardware wouldn’t have been able to make full use of it. We don’t know how affordable those SD Express cards will be either, but we could be looking at a future where those cards are necessary to play ninth generation console games on the Switch 2.
