Switch's next Tegra X1 looks set to deliver more performance and longer battery life

This year's E3 delivered some impressive new Switch software, but hopes that Nintendo would reveal its hotly rumoured hardware revision - or hardware revisions - proved fruitless. The eagerly anticipated new Switches failed to materialise, but they should be appearing in the not-too-distant future - and while we know nothing about physical form-factors, the silicon at the heart of the new hardware is starting to come into focus. The standard Tegra X1 found within Switch is evolving and the evidence exists to demonstrate that both the mooted Switch mini and Switch Pro are possible targets offering improved performance, better battery life - or perhaps even both.

The Switch hardware upgrade story starts last year - specifically around March 2018 - when Nintendo released the 5.0 version of its system software, known internally as Horizon. Support for the standard 't210' version of the Tegra X1, codenamed Logan, was joined by a new, hitherto unknown revision: t214, also referenced as Mariko. Nvidia's Tegra codenames are based on the real names of superheroes (Parker being Tegra X2) but Mariko is something different. Back in the day, she was a love interest for Logan/Wolverine in the Marvel comics - the obvious inference being that this is a partner chip, not a new product. Beyond that, little else was revealed - though Mariko seemed to be matched with 8GB of memory, a potential 2x upgrade for a retail Switch - or an extra 2GB for dev kits (we had a look at one during E3 - it reported 6GB of RAM in dev mode, 4GB in retail mode).

But what t214/Mariko actually is and how it differs from the standard Tegra was not immediately obvious - but it did seem to go beyond patching the security leaks that have made the Switch such fun for hackers to tool with. In recent weeks though, the story has moved on. The OG Switch debuted around the same time as a hardware revision for Nvidia's Tegra X1, found within the 2017 revision of the Shield Android TV micro-console/streamer - and featured nigh-on identical silicon to the Switch. Evidence suggests that the same thing is happening again - the Google Play Developer Console Device Catalogue is listing a new Shield, based on a t210b01 chip. So what's the connection between this and the t214 Mariko?

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