Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa mentioned that the corporate’s upcoming Change successor shall be backward appropriate. However he did so with out saying something about what the Change 2 shall be.
Meaning the brand new Change console, maybe dubbed the Change 2, will be capable of play video games from the older Change that debuted in 2017.
The Kyoto, Japan-based firm mentioned it expects to announce the subsequent system within the monetary 12 months ending March 31, 2025, however it didn’t say extra.
“Nintendo Switch is currently being played with by many customers so we decided it would be optimal for them to be able to play their Switch software on the successor model,” Furukawa mentioned, in keeping with Reuters.
Nintendo is unquestionably due for a brand new console, because the firm simply reported its revenues have been down 34% within the first six months of its fiscal 12 months. For the interval ending September 30, Nintendo lowered its forecast for what number of Change items would promote by March of subsequent 12 months from 13.5 million to 12.5 million.
Backward compatibility
Backward compatibility was once very onerous to do with emulation expertise. In older days, it was value prohibitive. However it’s a lot simpler to do when there are huge gaps in processing energy from the older tech to the newer tech. And it’s simpler to do backward compatibility if Nintendo stays with its present {hardware} structure, utilizing the identical key distributors similar to Nvidia.
That is hypothesis, however to me that implies that the {hardware} within the Change 2 would doubtless be similar to the {hardware} within the Change, which makes use of a variant of the Nvidia Tegra processor. This is able to counsel that Nintendo goes with a console that improves on the processing energy of the most recent semiconductor expertise however doesn’t change the structure in a dramatic approach.
The Nvidia Tegra X1 Mariko processor is a system-on-chip, with plenty of parts woven into the identical piece of silicon. It has 4 Arm-based Cortex A57 cores, with a max of 2GHz. The Nvidia GPU has 256 CUDA cores, with a max of 1GHz. It’s a second-generation Maxwell chip, which is fairly archaic by fashionable PC requirements, and it solely has 4GB of DRAM, or reminiscence for operating applications.
My guess is that the upgraded model for the Change 2 could have the identical Arm-based tech to make it straightforward to run Change video games on the brand new system. I doubt that Nintendo would make a fancy chip based mostly on a unique structure after which run the Change software program via emulation. That may be costly, and Nintendo isn’t identified for spending some huge cash on {hardware}.
Relatively, it typically sells the most affordable recreation console in comparison with its rivals and it has the bottom processing energy too. And it nonetheless offers its rivals a run for the cash by arising with one thing just like the Change, which has bought 146 million items in comparison with 61.8 million for the Sony PlayStation 5 and 27.7 million for the Microsoft Xbox Collection X/S.
