In recent days the appearance of an alleged Exynos chip with AMD GPU in the database of a well-known benchmark, it reminded us that some time ago Samsung and AMD signed an agreement to develop mobile SoC capable of high performance and low consumption. From the announcement of the agreement to today, everything had remained silent, but the results at least 50% higher than what made by the Adreno 650 GPU of the Snapdragon 865 of Qualcomm have revived our curiosity towards this project.
Curiosity that led to a thought, which we want to share with you: and if this chip, in addition to the smartphone, also found a place in a possible future version of Nintendo Switch? In our opinion, there would be a perfect fit of technologies and interests by all the companies involved.
Nintendo could enjoy a chip not only capable of supporting better graphics, gameplay with higher FPS and much more, but above all it could make porting is even simpler of cross-platform games on the console, thanks to thegraphics architecture shared with Sony and Microsoft consoles. The Samsung and AMD chip should in fact have a GPU based on RDNA architecture (or RDNA 2) or in any case a very similar declination.
Regarding AMD, the interest is clear: after reaffirming control over the gaming console market by designing the SoCs of the Xbox Series X and PS5, and providing the GPUs for cloud services such as Google Stadia and Microsoft Project xCloud, the company would put hands on the last fort still unconquered (Switch integrates an SoC Nvidia Tegra), thus reaffirming its centrality in the sector and snatching orders from the competitor Nvidia. A marketing interest, therefore, as well as an economic one.
As regards Samsung, we know that the company is doing great investments in new production processes and plants, with the intent to recover ground on TSMC and become the point of reference for the construction of chips for third parties. What better business card than to make millions of chips for a hypothetical future version of Nintendo Switch?
To all this is added that it is not clear how much Nvidia is interested in continuing its commitment on the console front. The company led by Jen-Hsun Huang has never shown a great proactive boost in the gaming field (console, ed) and its commitment regarding the design of SoC is mainly concentrated in the automotive and robotics fields. In short, the ingredients for a Switch 2 equipped with an Exynos chip with AMD GPU would all be there. We do not know what to do Nintendo and if the idea of taking this road has never flashed, but we will probably know more in the future: the new Samsung-AMD SoC should become reality in the course of 2021.
