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(Super Duper Nintendo Switch 2 ?) Nvidia announces a new Tegra with Blackwell architecture to be available next year

M

McRazzle

Member
https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/tec...hor-blackwell-gpu-next-gen-ai-car-experiences

NVIDIA barely unveiled the curtains off the new Blackwell GPU architecture and on the same day, the company confirmed that their previously announced Drive Thor SoC will be using Blackwell GPU architecture too!

As reported previously, Drive Thor will be the first Autonomous Vehicle (AV) platform to feature an inference transformer engine to accelerate inference performance of deep neural networks by many folds over prior generations. With the confirmation of using a Blackwell GPU, the next-gen AV platform is also ready to tackle LLM and generative AI workloads.

To put that in a better context, NVIDIA believes the added in-vehicle processing power will be vital to bring about a more conversational experiencewith your car. While it might not be a smooth talker (yet) like Michael Knight’s KITT 2000, it would possess more context and nuances to reduce our current robotic style of invoking the driving assistant and its follow-up responses.


Beyond more feature-rich cockpit functionality for drivers and entertainment options for passengers, it will also offer up safe and secure autonomous driving capability, all on a centralised platform – depending on the deployment preferences of each car partner. Drive Thor is also capable of deciphering much more advanced road signs and informing the car occupants accordingly for their next steps due to its powerful onboard processing in conjunction with in-car generative AI processing.
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https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-drive-powers-next-generation-transportation
The Great and Powerful DRIVE Thor
Slated for production vehicles as early as next year, DRIVE Thor will harness the new NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, which features a generative AI engine and other cutting-edge capabilities, and wields 1,000 teraflops of performance to help ensure safe and secure autonomous machines.
Click to expand...
 
tusharngf

tusharngf

Member
Irobot82 said:
Pipedream. Nintendo is never on the leading edge anymore.
Click to expand...

QjiqL6s.jpg
 
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Polygonal_Sprite

Polygonal_Sprite

Gold Member
Going on the first few replies people really didn’t read the OP did they lol.

We’ve known what the Switch 2 is for 18 months - CPU that’s 10x the current Switch CPU. 1.5TFLOP Handheld / 3TFLOP Docked GPU. 12GB RAM. Much faster flash drive and larger faster game cards.

All of that means that the next Switch circa 2033 is going to have around 10TFLOP of GPU compute when docked at best.
 
Codes 208

Codes 208

Member
The tegra 2 was revealed when the switch specs leaked almost a year before it was officially revealed and it still ended up with the tegra 1

Theres no reason to believe theyre going to use the newest specs when the design and specs have likely already been finalized for awhile now
 
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M

McRazzle

Member
Codes 208 said:
The tegra 2 was revealed when the switch specs leaked almost a year before it was officially revealed and it still ended up with the tegra 1

Theres no reason to believe theyre going to use the newest specs when the design and specs have likely already been finalized for awhile now
Click to expand...

True, but the fact that is going into cars means it has been taped out and safety tested for 2 years at the least.
 
Self_Destructive

Self_Destructive

Member
By all reports the Switch 2 hardware is already done and out to developers. It's the software which is allegedly what's not quite ready yet for launch.. so very doubtful Switch 2 will be using a new Tegra chip coming next year.. lol
 
M

McRazzle

Member
Self_Destructive said:
By all reports the Switch 2 hardware is already done and out to developers. It's the software which is allegedly what's not quite ready yet for launch.. so very doubtful Switch 2 will be using a new Tegra chip coming next year.. lol
Click to expand...
The chip isn't new, it's been done for at least 2 years.
They're doesn't seem to be any reports that are reliable at this point as the main leaker Kopite7 has gotten alot of info wrong lately.
And I would guess only Nintendo internally would be allowed to have final dev kits since Blackwell isn't out yet.
 
B

Beechos

Member
For the wait for next year folks, then next year comes new advancements get announced and it's wait for next year again.
 
UnravelKatharsis

UnravelKatharsis

Member
Codes 208 said:
The tegra 2 was revealed when the switch specs leaked almost a year before it was officially revealed and it still ended up with the tegra 1

Theres no reason to believe theyre going to use the newest specs when the design and specs have likely already been finalized for awhile now
Click to expand...

Stop being reasonable!
 
HerjansEagleFeeder

HerjansEagleFeeder

Member
DonkeyPunchJr said:
No not really, it was based on the 2 year old Tegra X1 chip, and if rumors were to be believed, Nintendo went with it because they got a killer deal after Nvidia overproduced them.
Click to expand...
So what could they have used instead for this type of device, especially considering the battery life for a handheld like this?
 
M

McRazzle

Member
Gameplay Gods Bless said:
No we know the Switch 2 is using an SoC based off of Tegra Orin iirc it's called t239.
Click to expand...
T239 is on 8nm.
8nm doesn't jive with what Nintendo's President said about pursuing cutting edge technology and getting 5-6 hours of battery life.
And presumably the Switch 2 can run the Matrix demo, which I don't think a GPU could do running under 1 GHZ , as an 8nm chip would have to do, to get anywhere near 5 hours of battery life regardless of the resolution.

Maybe it will be the Orin chip, but it would have to be die shrunk to be practical to run next/current gen games.
 
HerjansEagleFeeder

HerjansEagleFeeder

Member
Imtjnotu said:
the switch came out in 2017.

with a chip designed in 2014...


Wendy Williams No GIF
Click to expand...
The release year of that chip (Tegra 2 was 2011 or so, so even before the WiiU) is completely irrelevant to the question since Nintendo can't use an off the shelf Tegra chip for its devices. Platform holders typically use custom variants of these SoCs. So when it became apparent that the Tegra 1 might be a bit weak for the planned life cycle of the Switch (I assume that happened since I don't think Nintendos employees are that incompetent), it was already too late to change course. You don't just build a console in a couple of months. You could argue that going with the Tegra 1 in the first place was a mistake, but we don't know when they started designing the Switch. My assumption would be earlier than we think, because the WiiU was such a colossal failure.
 
Gameplay Gods Bless

Gameplay Gods Bless

Member
McRazzle said:
T239 is on 8nm.
8nm doesn't jive with what Nintendo's President said about pursuing cutting edge technology and getting 5-6 hours of battery life.
And presumably the Switch 2 can run the Matrix demo, which I don't think a GPU could do running under 1 GHZ , as an 8nm chip would have to do, to get anywhere near 5 hours of battery life regardless of the resolution.

Maybe it will be the Orin chip, but it would have to be die shrunk to be practical to run next/current gen games.
Click to expand...
Last I checked we didn't have any good data on which fab and process 239 is on. Do you have a source?
 
Gameplay Gods Bless

Gameplay Gods Bless

Member
Imtjnotu said:
the switch came out in 2017.

with a chip designed in 2014...


Wendy Williams No GIF
Click to expand...
The Switch's Tegra X1 was launched in 2015, the switch in 2017. The PS4s hw was from 2012 (2011 if we go by your method of counting) and it launched in 2013 but the Switch actually had a more respectable configuration than what the PS4 has surprisingly enough. The leap from Nintendo's last ARM handheld (3ds) to it's successor (Switch) was massive, the 3ds couldn't even match a Gamecube while the Switch beat the PS3 and Wii U.

The CPU on the switch was actually a good one compared to the terrible CPU in the PS4. The difference is the Switch runs at 9-15Ws of power while the PS4 uses north of 150W. The Switch has to sip because it's a handheld while the PS5 has an industrial pump filling it with juice.
 
Knightime_X

Knightime_X

Member
Irobot82 said:
Pipedream. Nintendo is never on the leading edge anymore.
Click to expand...
That's because Iwata believed weaker hardware lead to better games.
That was true in the early days because devs had to be more creative.
Anymore, most 3rd party devs try and shoehorn the game just to barely run.
 
O

Ozriel

M$FT
PonyStation4 said:
The Switch came out with 2 years old mid range tablet hardware that was developed to be used in cars. Not only was it the furthest thing from advanced, Nintendo also had to significantly under clock it.
Click to expand...

The X1 in an actively cooled config was more powerful than flagship tablets at the time.

The fact that they had to under clock it doesn’t really support your argument.
 
P

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Ozriel said:
The X1 in an actively cooled config was more powerful than flagship tablets at the time.

The fact that they had to under clock it doesn’t really support your argument.
Click to expand...
Having to disable cores and/or lower the clock speed significantly (with zero customisations done by nVIDIA for Nintendo) just tells us that it was not really meant for the task at hand and had to be be adapted in the best way possible and it tells us nVIDIA has not changed and they will not tailor their designs for their customers one bit (no semi-custom designs) which is why I see the other console makers sticking with AMD.

Nintendo did the best they could to support the little Switch and the console got enough sales that developers were motivated to optimise for it.
 
F

FireFly

Member
McRazzle said:
T239 is on 8nm.
8nm doesn't jive with what Nintendo's President said about pursuing cutting edge technology and getting 5-6 hours of battery life.
And presumably the Switch 2 can run the Matrix demo, which I don't think a GPU could do running under 1 GHZ , as an 8nm chip would have to do, to get anywhere near 5 hours of battery life regardless of the resolution.

Maybe it will be the Orin chip, but it would have to be die shrunk to be practical to run next/current gen games.
Click to expand...
1536 CUDA cores at 1 GHz in docked mode would give 3 TF, which would be about half of the expected performance of the Series S. I think with ray tracing + DLSS + UE5 performance improvements, it wouldn't be impossible to close the gap and get a version of the Matrix demo running.

Then in portable mode, you would just cut the clockspeed back a lot.

Edit: Fixed comparison
 
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Zathalus

Zathalus

Member
It would be amazing if this was the reason the Switch 2 was delayed to 2025, but I highly doubt that is the case.
 
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