Geekerwan got a Switch 2 motherboard early and did a full die shot analysis of T239 with help from Kurnal



207mm² v.s. 118mm²

It's also larger than the RTX 3050 Ti (mobile) GPU, Apple M2, Ryzen 7840H (Z1 extreme) and Qualcomm's X elite.

Tape out year of the SoC was on 2021 as annotated on the die. They also looked at the RTX 3050 GPU die, which had a tape out year of 2020.

T239 brief summary.

  • 8 Core A78C cores, with 4MB L3 Cache and 256kb L2 cache on each die
    • The die area of the A78C is the same as the 8nm T234 orin, indicating the same process node.
    • The C and AE suffix doesn't bear much meaning on the core design itself, but rather the ARM classification indicating Compute and Automotive and how the cores operating
  • 6 TPC, 2SM/TPC, 1536 CUDA Cores
    • Ampere design, although it's layout seems odd as the TPC's are separated
    • The design of the GPU seems more alike to Ada Lovelace
    • in terms of area of the TPC, the T239 is 22% smaller than the orin T234
  • There are some differences in the chip design itself, it's not exactly 8nm and some aspects are closer to Samsung's 10nm process node fabrication.
  • They highlight the previously "leaked" clocked speeds and like DF mention that its closest equivalent is the RTX 2050, although heavily downclocked.
  • Like DF they also do a simulation of Switch 2 performance with the RTX 2050 downclocked as a proxy.
    • The docked performance is aligned to the GTX 1050 Ti in docked mode and GTX 750 ti in handheld mode in Synthetic tests Steel Nomad Light
    • It's far from the Xbox Series S and the closest mobile equivalent are Apple's A18 Pro, M1 in docked mode, and the Steam Deck is a bit better in handheld mode * They test Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth Wukong, Monster hunter Wild, KCD2
  • They also took a T234 board (Orin) and tested CPU performance through synthetics (geekbench 6)
    • Downclocking it to 1.1 GHz and 1 GHz, its single core performance is twice as much as the PS4 and 3x the Switch, closest laptop equivalent is the i7-4700HQ.
    • Closest mobile equivalent in multithreaded performance is the A12 in the iPhone, which btw has more than 2x the single threaded performance compared to the "Switch 2"
    • They also used a downclocked i7-10700KF to approximate Switch 2's CPU performance

An even shorter tl;dr for just the die analysis:

  • Very likely SEC8N based on gate pitch and die size
  • 8 ARM-A78C CPU cores
  • 4MB L3 cache shared between all CPU cores
  • 256KB L2 cache per core
  • 1536 CUDA cores Ampere arch (6 TPCs)
  • 1MB L2 for the GPU
 
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It's smaller than the T234 but bigger than the mobile 3050, using 8nm Ampere but put together like Lovelace. Just a bit of everything.

That said, using downclocked PC components will not determine what we'll actually see from the console itself, for that it's best to just wait.
 
Some reality check for sure. 1500 CUDA cores vs 2500 in 3050 so don't put a lot of faith in DLSS beyond FHD.

That being said it is floating more or less around Steam Deck level of performance.
 
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From the video

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The mix of ada and lovelace (rtx 30 and 40 series afaik) is interesting, I wasn't expecting that and the mix of 10nm and 8nm.
 
bad for third party, but i cant wait for what first party is going to deliver. look at their output on the switch. they managed to deliver awesome games this whole gen with a supermarket tablet.
 
So a 2022 Steam deck has a slightly better GPU and a significantly better CPU than the Switch 2 in handheld mode (DLSS will save the day), Samsung's 8-10nm manufacturing process in 2025 when consoles were already being manufactured at 7nm in 2020 is a bit of a stretch, even for Nintendo.
 
So a 2022 Steam deck has a slightly better GPU and a significantly better CPU than the Switch 2 in handheld mode (DLSS will save the day), Samsung's 8-10nm manufacturing process in 2025 when consoles were already being manufactured at 7nm in 2020 is a bit of a stretch, even for Nintendo.
It's a very old and cheap APU tech-wise and even DLSS is somewhat kneecapped due to low number of CUDA cores.

But I've expected nothing more from Nintendo.
 
It's a very old and cheap APU tech-wise and even DLSS is somewhat kneecapped due to low number of CUDA cores.

But I've expected nothing more from Nintendo.
Ada Lovelace is way above the current gen consoles… An devs coding to the metal is going to show amazing results for the Switch 2. We already can see the results in Cyberpunk.
 
So a 2022 Steam deck has a slightly better GPU and a significantly better CPU than the Switch 2 in handheld mode (DLSS will save the day), Samsung's 8-10nm manufacturing process in 2025 when consoles were already being manufactured at 7nm in 2020 is a bit of a stretch, even for Nintendo.
So the steam deck is more powerful after all. DLSS will need to do the heavy lifting on NS2, but while FSR2 isn't great, I'm sure it's probably not as noticeable on a small screen.
Course, the steam deck is running full ass PC games, so it will perform worse than any bespoke ports like cyberpunk, but that's to be expected.
 
So a 2022 Steam deck has a slightly better GPU and a significantly better CPU than the Switch 2 in handheld mode (DLSS will save the day), Samsung's 8-10nm manufacturing process in 2025 when consoles were already being manufactured at 7nm in 2020 is a bit of a stretch, even for Nintendo.
Lovelace is no slightly better is Way better… The CPU is way better too, the issue with the 8-10nm is going to be the power consumption in handheld mode. Other than that is this leaks are true, i better than the leak that we have before. If the GPU is Lovelace architecture over Ampere is a solid Win…
 
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so are there any details that are new compared to the leaks from 2 years ago?

at first glance this looks like info we already knew, just confirmed now
 
Ada Lovelace is way above the current gen consoles… An devs coding to the metal is going to show amazing results for the Switch 2. We already can see the results in Cyberpunk.
Ada Lovelace the coder is better than current gen consoles?
Or the architecture? Like a blueprint of the chip is better than current gen consoles?
Cause you certainly aren't implying that the Switch2 APU is somehow going to out perform a Series X or PS5 are you?
 
Lovelace is no slightly better is Way better… The CPU is way better too, the issue with the 8-10nm is going to be the power consumption in handheld mode. Other than that is this leaks are true, i better than the leak that we have before. If the GPU is Lovelace architecture over Ampere is a solid Win…
Can you explain me like I'm five what is it and how is it good news ?
 
very disappointing that they went with 8nm, if they paid more for 4nm fabrication it's a very very capable chip and could have been pushed harder.
 
Ada Lovelace the coder is better than current gen consoles?
Or the architecture? Like a blueprint of the chip is better than current gen consoles?
Cause you certainly aren't implying that the Switch2 APU is somehow going to out perform a Series X or PS5 are you?
The architecture is way better and supports DLSS 3.1. is a more modern architecture with Nvidia tech.
 
Great job, except for the "similar PC benchmark"... So basically Nvidia leak was more than real, they basically revealed Switch 2 when we were still believing the Switch Pro was right at the corner lol
 
So the steam deck is more powerful after all. DLSS will need to do the heavy lifting on NS2, but while FSR2 isn't great, I'm sure it's probably not as noticeable on a small screen.
Course, the steam deck is running full ass PC games, so it will perform worse than any bespoke ports like cyberpunk, but that's to be expected.
cant wait to see comparisons steamdeck games old chips crud upscaling not opertermized BOOKMARKED
 
Can you explain me like I'm five what is it and how is it good news ?
If the Switch 2 indeed have a Lovelace GPU is a more modern architecture that supports DLSS 3.1 and more efficient RT cores and more efficient overall compared to current gen. I am not saying we are going to have an portable PS5. But closer than Series S in docked mode. Before was rumored to use Ampere architecture. The series Nvidia 3000 uses Ampere the series 4000 uses Lovelace.
 
Great job, except for the "similar PC benchmark"... So basically Nvidia leak was more than real, they basically revealed Switch 2 when we were still believing the Switch Pro was right at the corner lol
I mean we all know Switch Pro was cancelled and replaced by the OLED model
 
So, Digital Foundrys analysis, insisting it was a 8nm part and performance estimates, using a heavily downclocked RTX 2050 GPU, was pretty much spot on...well done, Mr Richard Leadbetter!
 
This is everything you need to know. Switch is capable of DLSS 3.0… The secret sauce of the Switch 2.

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literally every single Nvidia RTX GPU is capable of every single DLSS version.
you can run DLSS4 on an RTX2060 if you want to.

this actually doesn't change anything...
 
From the video

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I wouldn't trust in those GPU benchmarks at all, they're doing the same thing than DF.

Not sure about the CPU benchmark tho because it's using an actual T234 chip for that and the Switch 2 has exactly the same CPU but downclocked if I'm not mistaken so those are probably on point, just not the GPU ones.
 
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So, Digital Foundrys analysis, insisting it was a 8nm part and performance estimates, using a heavily downclocked RTX 2050 GPU, was pretty much spot on...well done, Mr Richard Leadbetter!
so good couldnt see dlss and said switch 2 to week to run it ahahahahaha

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