Switch 2 with Tegra239: NVIDIA’s SoC photographed for the first time – familiar ingredients, subtly boiled down

So, now it’s out. After the rumors about NVIDIA’s Tegra239 and its use in Nintendo’s Switch successor had almost died out, the net has finally provided a photo as proof. On the silicon: “T239”. Surprise? Not really. Confirmation? Absolutely. This means Nintendo is staying true to its long-standing partner NVIDIA and continuing to rely on its own cobbled-together ARM SoCs – this time with a fresh coat of paint and presumably a little more steam under the hood.

The technology behind the chip: solid home cooking instead of haute cuisine

What we know so far (or can at least make sense of it) doesn’t sound like a technological quantum leap, but it doesn’t sound like a makeshift solution either: eight ARM Cortex-A78C cores clocked at 1.1 to 1.5 GHz. That should be enough to smoothly fling a few turtle shells across the screen without the fan howling. As expected, the clock rate varies between handheld and dock mode – as you would expect. On the GPU side, things get a little more exciting. A mix of Ada Lovelace and Ampere is used here, a somewhat strange architectural hybrid. If this makes you think of Frankenstein, you might not be entirely wrong. According to leaks, the chip has 1536 CUDA cores – not bad for a handheld, but rather manageable for a desktop computer. But hey, we’re not talking about an RTX 4090 here, but a piece of silicon stuffed into a plastic housing with a screen.

Memory, interface and other ingredients

The whole thing is connected with a 128-bit wide interface that can digest LPDDR5. This is not a shock either, but rather a logical development of the setup already used in the first Switch. The bandwidth should land somewhere in the range of 50 to 68 GB/s, depending on the clock rate. Not a high-end symphony, but enough to ensure that we don’t completely lose touch in the handheld sector. The use of NVIDIA’s DLSS is exciting – at least for those who enjoy pixel counting. Deep Learning Super Sampling is now part of the standard repertoire if you want to squeeze as many frames as possible out of as little hardware as possible. In plain language: The Switch 2 will hardly render natively in 4K, but will start somewhere at 720p or 1080p and have the rest upscaled by the AI. Enough for many, blinding the rest.

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The exclusive model: NVIDIA remains loyal to Nintendo – or vice versa?

It’s not really surprising that Nintendo continues to rely on NVIDIA. The marriage has been stable for years, they know each other, they know what they’re getting – not too much, but not too little either. The Tegra239 is therefore a classic custom SoC: tailor-made for a customer that they obviously want to continue to serve exclusively. For NVIDIA, this is one of the few opportunities to still have a say in the ARM gaming sector. The rest of the world is either running on x86 or tinkering with Snapdragon derivatives themselves. And what about the ambitious plans for the PC sector that were still being whispered about last year? The alleged N1 or N1X SoCs in collaboration with MediaTek? Radio silence. Maybe something will come of it. But maybe not. For the time being, Tegra remains exclusive to Nintendo – which in turn explains why NVIDIA is keeping a low profile with further details.

No fireworks, but a clean flame

The first real sighting of the T239 is one thing above all: a visual confirmation of something that has been simmering in the rumor mill for a long time. In technical terms, you are served a solid SoC menu – nothing for gourmets, but absolutely enjoyable for everyday use. The combination of ARM cores, modern GPU, LPDDR5 and DLSS is not spectacular, but functional. Anyone expecting a hardware revolution on the Switch 2 should perhaps adjust their expectations a little – downwards, mind you. Because the bottom line remains: Even if Nintendo isn’t reinventing anything here, it has at least made sensible improvements. Will that be enough to keep up with the rest of the mobile gaming world in 2025? Hard to say. But the Tegra239 at least shows that NVIDIA still knows how to tailor a suitable SoC – as long as the customer pays for it.

Source: Kurnalsalts via X