Rumor: Nintendo Reducing Switch 2 OS Allocation To 1 Core & 2GB Of Nvidia SOC

We have some interesting information about the Nintendo Switch 2’s hardware.

While Nintendo has an official webpage sharing technical specs of the console, they have kept a lot of the details out. However, we learned about a lot of these details much earlier, including some that Nintendo have omitted.

Some very dedicated Nintendo fans spent the last year collecting data from Hosiden, one of the contracted companies assembling the Switch 2 for Nintendo. Among that data were the components of the Switch 2, down to their manufacturers. While these fans who were working together aren’t all active in Famiboards, they did decide to share most of the information there.

You can see Famiboards’ collected information from January here, but Digital Foundry claimed to have a list of the confirmed final technical specifications of the console as of two weeks ago. They didn’t share their source for this information, so we can only assume that they have their own sources. We can’t possibly know who those are, but for example, they could be getting this information from third party developers making games for the console.

Digital Foundry claimed that the Switch 2’s SOC has 8 cores, which was confirmed in Famiboards posts. They also stated that developers have use of 6 of those cores, with 2 of them reserved for the operating system. Subsequently, Both Digital Foundry and Famiboards claim that the console has 12 GB RAM. Digital Foundry claims 9 GB RAM is available to the developers, with 3 GB used by the OS.

Today, Famiboards user MattAgain makes an interesting new claim about the Switch 2’s OS allocations. He said this:

I’ve heard the goal is to get it down to 2 GB and 1 core, but no idea when or if that will be accomplished. More resources have been released since the earlier dev environment though, and I expect that to continue.

This in a discussion where Famiboards users were talking about how Nintendo pushed firmware updates to bring down the OS allocations the original Switch took from its own hardware. While we don’t know who MattAgain’s sources are, it’s possible that he got this information from developers currently making games for the console.

Of course, we have a week to go before the public even gets their hands on the Switch 2, so we don’t have a frame of reference yet to understand how much impact these changes could have. They may be simply early hopes of what’s possible, that will take a few years before they can even be implemented. But like the original Switch, that could pay off with games that run more efficiently, and can be played longer thanks to better battery performance.

Thankfully, in a matter of days a lot of this rampant speculation is about to end.