Since its unveiling last October, there has been little information regarding Nintendo's upcoming console. Rumors have surfaced that the device will be using Nvidia's Tegra X1. Now, information about its critical CPU and GPU clocks made it to headlines.
Just Last week, a Venturebeat reported that the Nintendo Switch will feature a GPU based on the second-generation Maxwell technology. However, how will Nintendo intends to customize the power of the X1 processor remains uncertain.
News, however, about how the power of the Nintendo Switch will transition from a full portable console to a home console has been leaked. Eurogamer now reportedly claims to have knowledge about the Nintendo Switch's specs.
Firstly, the Nintendo Switch's CPU power will be the same when it is either docked or undocked, running at 1020 MHz. Things get interesting when it comes to the device's GPU speed. When docked, clock speeds are reported locked at 768 MHz. This is relatively lower than Nvidia's Shield Android TV, running at 1 GHz. Also notable is that the Nintendo Switch will sport 4 ARM Cortex-A457 CPU cores, according to TechReport. Digital Foundry said: "But the big surprise from our perspective was the extent to which Nintendo has down-clocked the GPU to hit its thermal and battery life targets."
Secondly, the earlier report claimed that Nintendo will not utilize the Pascal architecture for the Nintendo Switch. Nvidia's Maxwell graphics will instead replace it. This news was confirmed during an event in October where Nintendo announced that Switch would use a variant of Nvidia's Tegra chip, according to GameSpot.
This only means that the Nintendo Switch will have more than 1 teraflop of performance, way below the Project Scorpio (6 teraflops), the PS4 Pro (4.2 teraflops), the standard PS4 (1.8 teraflops), and the standard Xbox One (1.3 teraflops).
Meanwhile, Nintendo did not comment whether the reports were true or not. We will simply have to wait until Nintendo officially unveils the specs of the Switch come January 2017. The Switch event has been scheduled for January 12 where Nintendo will also unveil the Nintendo Switch price and launch lineup. As regards the release date, it will be sometime March 2017.