ReviewTechUSA has heard from his sources that it is a Pro console trying to reach the base PS4 level performance. Apparently they started working on a custom chip even before the Switch we have today, but it was too expensive at the time and they weren't sure if the customers will like the concept, so they went first with downclocked Tegra X1 to test the waters.
Could get announced in January.
Foxconn leak would suggest this is true. Matt did say that Nintendo couldn't go with a more powerful Switch because it was too expensive, this always seemed like a weird comment to me because the Switch wastes a ton of money on different things it didn't need to do, those half dozen circuit boards for one, and the dock's separate hardware for display is another, not to mention it was sold at a profit. Nintendo having a second more powerful Switch prototype that was too expensive for a $300 price launch makes sense here. He would be referring to that and not the difference that shrinking the X1 to 16nm would make (which is at best going to add $30 to the Switch's price).
Nvidia said that Nintendo and they were looking at a long relationship, possibly going decades and if they were sitting on the next model at the time, that makes perfect sense.
Developers have said weird stuff about Switch ports, even Reggie said that 2019 is when we will start seeing 3rd party games arrive day and date, a parity console would facilitate that, but also Rainbowsix Siege developer's weird comment about the Switch not yet being the one to get the game.
We all know that Nintendo is making a more powerful Switch, it coming this soon is the shock, but if you buy into the narrative that Nintendo pushed out Switch to test the waters, it makes sense that they would sureup it's failures, and performance is a big deal, even for Nintendo where their own games struggle. Switch also has one big unNintendo spec, slow memory bandwidth. This is something Nintendo's engineers are always pushing for... There is a quote a few years old from a Nintendo developer that high speed memory bandwidth is part of Nintendo's DNA and what they want to pass on to future generations at Nintendo. This was during the Switch's development, so the X1 chip has always been a bit weird for a Nintendo product, it's performance is really par for the course, but the memory bottleneck is extremely odd.
I think people are caught up in the timing of this device from the platform's perspective and not looking at the timing of this device from the industries' perspective, building a refresh 3 months sooner than the PS4 Pro might be a bad thing? Having a 10-20 Million user base for next gen games to be ported to on a Switch that can handle it, would be a big incentive to keep 3rd party interest high. We saw what happened during the Wii era, and while the Wii literally was half the market, the industry at large ignored it.
