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Sort of. They appear to be in a bit of a holding pattern, having not released a competitive SoC in that space for some years.

The rumor is that the Switch contract only came because Nvidia had a firesale on those older chips that they expected to make their way into flag ship Android devices, but instead sat in inventory for years.

Maybe after the ARM acquisition goes through (if it does), they'll start looking down that line again.



NVIDIA was involved in the Switch since even before the Tegra X1 was even announced. Those rumours aren’t true.

(You can take a peek at LinkedIn for example, of former Nintendo engineers, which makes the timeline more clear)


Can you give some more pointers? There's a lot of former Nintendo engineers.

I find it very difficult to believe that contrary to the rumors, Nintendo had been sitting on a SoC for many years without releasing a product or even pushing for a die shrink. Like, the Tegra X1 was announced in 2014, and released into products by 2015, and the Switch didn't come out until 2017.

Turning off an entire core complex also points to it not being designed for them. Nintendo isn't known for paying for gates they aren't using.


For example:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyhchen from the NVIDIA side

"Gave a power consumption related demo to Nintendo team during sales process" (for his Jul 2013-Dec 2014 period of employment)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gyferic from the Nintendo side

"Benchmark parallel processing - OpenMP stress test on SoC Nvidia Tegra X1" (for a Sept 2014-Mar 2015 period of employment)




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