The Nintendo Switch 2 T239 could be an 8nm chip, and while this could make good performance and battery life a challenge, there’s a good chance this process node won’t significantly impact the system.
The tech experts at Digital Foundry took a good look at the leaked system’s motherboard, focusing on the T239 SoC, as most of the other components found on it aren’t particularly interesting. While it is currently difficult to pinpoint the exact size of the chip due to the angled picture, Digital Foundry’s experts think that the Samsung 8nm process node was more likely used for the chip over other rumored process nodes for a few reasons.
For starters, the chip is somewhat of an offshoot of the T234 chip, which uses the Samsung 8nm process node. Additionally, NVIDIA Ampere architecture was designed for this process node, and porting it to a different process node like 4nm would be a waste of time, as it would have made more sense simply to go with the Lovelace architecture, which was built with 4nm in mind. A Samsung 5nm process node could still be possible, but it would still require porting Ampere over to a different process node. Also, the Samsung 8nm process node is quite cheap, as it has never been extremely popular, and Samsung likely doesn’t have that many customers for it right now, so its low cost would definitely fit Nintendo’s approach.
Even if the Nintendo Switch 2 is powered by a Samsung 8nm chip, the process node may end up not being as big an issue as many are speculating. While 8nm is not particularly power-efficient, and achieving good performance and battery life on it may be a challenge, all the current power measurements are likely way off the mark, as they are based on the T234 chip, which is much bigger than the T239 and requires a certain amount of power even with reduced clock speeds. Additionally, the T239 chip may have begun development as some sort of offshoot of the much bigger and more power-hungry T234 chip, but the two chips have been designed by different teams, have different CPUs, and the Nintendo Switch 2 chip has some additional features, such as a file decompression block required for fast loading and asset management, so it’s not a cut-down version of the chip used in the automotive segment. Having likely been designed from scratch on the 8nm process node with certain power-efficiency goals in mind, which are suggested by the small battery cavity seen in the leaked motherboard, there’s a very good chance that the chip’s process node is not going to impact the system in any significant way.
The Nintendo Switch 2 motherboard leak was only the first one to surface online in the first few days of 2025. Yesterday, pictures showcasing the new Joy-Con controller emerged online, and some of the additions from the original controller suggest that the controller could be used as a PC mouse. Will this be the new gimmick of the system? Hopefully, it won’t take much longer to get the answer to this question and every other that fans have been asking themselves for a few months.
