Nintendo switch uses tegra x1 soc, similar to shield tv

Much had been speculated on what was the SoC chosen by Nintendo to use it on the Nintendo Switch. We knew it was made by Nvidia, but we didn't know what exactly the model was, this secret has finally been revealed.

Nintendo Switch uses the same SoC as the Shield TV

The doubts that we had about the SoC of the Nintendo Switch invited us to speculate with two possibilities, whether it was a custom Nvidia SoC based on the current Tegra or if it was the same non-personalized SoC of the Shield TVs.

Finally, the chip chosen is the Tegra X1 T210 CPU with a GM20B Maxwell GPU, this configuration is exactly the same as the one used in the Nvidia Shield TV released two years ago.

The frequencies at which this chip works vary depending on whether it is connected to the dock or if we use it in portable mode. When the console is in the dock connected to a TV, the frequency of this Tegra X1 chip reaches 912MHz.

When the console is used in portable mode, the frequencies drop to 384MHz or even less. This is to save battery consumption as much as possible but not enough to compromise the graphics performance of games.

Switch is 30% faster than WiiU in portable mode

The most interesting thing is that the console can work with two different computing units, one with FP32 and the other with FP16. When the console operates in FP32, the power reaches 196 Gflop s and in FP16 about 392 Gflops. This means that the Nintendo Switch surpasses the WiiU performance by 30% when we use it as a laptop.

We recommend reading common Nintendo Switch problems and how to fix it.

When the console is in the dock, the computing power reaches 471 Gflops in FP32 mode, plus or minus 50% the performance of XBOX One. When using the FP16, the power shoots up to 942 Gflops, almost the XBOX One power.

The difference between FP32 and FP16 is in the image quality, although the computing power increases when using FP16, the image would not be as sharp as if we were using FP32, which is what is currently used by the XBOX One, Playstation 4 and on PC.

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