Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa has said that the company’s next Switch successor will be backward compatible. But he did so without saying anything about what the Switch 2 would be.
That means the new Switch console, likely called the Switch 2, will be able to play older Switch games from 2017.
The Kyoto, Japan-based company said it plans to announce its next device in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025, but did not provide further details.
According to Reuters, Furukawa said, “Currently, many customers are playing Nintendo Switch, so we decided that it would be best to be able to play Switch software on a successor model.”
Nintendo is definitely planning on launching a new console, as the company just reported a 34% drop in revenue for the first six months of its fiscal year. As of September 30th, Nintendo has lowered its forecast for the number of Switch units sold by March of next year from 13.5 million units to 12.5 million units.
backward compatibility
In the past, backward compatibility was very difficult to achieve with emulation technology. In the past, it was prohibitively expensive. But it’s much easier to do that when there’s a big difference in processing power between the old and new technology. Also, backwards compatibility would be easy to achieve if Nintendo maintains its current hardware architecture using the same major vendor, such as Nvidia.
This is speculation, but to me it means the Switch 2’s hardware will likely be very similar to the Switch’s hardware, which uses a variant of the Nvidia Tegra processor. This may suggest that Nintendo will adopt a console that improves the processing power of the latest semiconductor technology but does not drastically change the architecture.
The Nvidia Tegra X1 Mariko processor is a system-on-a-chip, with many components built into the same piece of silicon. It has four Arm-based Cortex A57 cores up to 2GHz. Nvidia GPUs have 256 CUDA cores up to 1GHz. It’s a second-generation Maxwell chip, quite outdated by modern PC standards, and only has 4GB of DRAM, or memory, to run programs.
My guess is that the upgraded version of the Switch 2 will feature the same Arm-based technology to make it easier to run Switch games on the new device. I don’t think Nintendo would create a complex chip based on a different architecture and run the Switch software through emulation. It would be expensive, and Nintendo isn’t known for spending a lot of money on hardware.
Rather, they often sell the cheapest gaming consoles compared to their competitors, and they also have the least processing power. And by developing products like the Switch, it continues to stay ahead of its rivals. The Switch sold 146 million units, compared to 61.8 million units for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and 27.7 million units for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S.
