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Nintendo Switch

Nintendo Switch, represented with its retail processor, graphics and installed writable memory.

Manufacturer
Nintendo
Released
March 2017
Region
Worldwide
Record status
approved
A Nintendo Switch seated in its black dock and photographed against white, with a pair of blue and red Joy-Con controllers clipped into a black grip standing to the left.

A Nintendo Switch in its dock, with the Joy-Con pair held in the grip that came with it.

Evan-Amos · Public domain (released by its author) · Wikimedia Commons

About this machine

Docked and handheld operation are separate configurations. Their different GPU rates are not silently collapsed into one nominal clock. Nintendo publishes neither rate, nor any frequency at all: the figures here are independent reporting, and the catalog records the vendor's silence beside them rather than instead of them.

Configuration

Docked mode

Component Role Count Clock Capacity
NVIDIA Tegra X1 CPU Main CPU 1 1.02 GHz Nominal clock —
NVIDIA Tegra X1 GPU GPU 1 768 MHz Nominal clock —
Nintendo Switch unified memory Unified memory 1 — 4 GiB shared

The dock permits the GPU’s 768 MHz operating point.

Handheld mode

Component Role Count Clock Capacity
NVIDIA Tegra X1 CPU Main CPU 1 1.02 GHz Nominal clock —
NVIDIA Tegra X1 GPU GPU 1 307.2 MHz Nominal clock —
Nintendo Switch unified memory Unified memory 1 — 4 GiB shared

The handheld power envelope uses a lower 307.2 MHz GPU operating point.

Figures for the whole machine

Nintendo Switch: system figures

provisional A figure marked provisional is recorded but not accepted: its evidence is unsettled. It may rely on one source, an unconfirmed announcement, or a digit read from a damaged scan. The reason appears under the figure. The catalog shows the figure but never uses it in a multiplier. How records are judged.

Metric Value Evidence Basis Method Source
Clock frequency cpu provisional 1.02 GHz Confirmed Vendor-rated Nominal clock Published independently The four Cortex-A57 cores of the shipped console, which run at the same rate in both modes. Provisional on the sourcing, not on the number. Digital Foundry states it as confirmed for retail hardware three months before release, and Nintendo has never contradicted it or published anything to compare it against. The policy asks for two sources that state the figure; the second publication reviewed here declines, recording instead that the frequencies were never officially disclosed. So this waits, and meanwhile feeds no multiplier.
Clock frequency cpu provisional 1.02 GHz Confirmed Vendor-rated Nominal clock Published independently The four Cortex-A57 cores of the shipped console, undocked. The same processor frequency as the docked configuration, and the point of the sentence it is read from: the machine keeps its game logic running at one rate whether or not it is on a television. Provisional on one stating source.
Clock frequency gpu provisional 768 MHz Confirmed Vendor-rated Nominal clock Published independently The 256 Maxwell cores of the shipped console, docked. The docked graphics frequency, provisional for the same reason as the processor clock: one publication states it, the other says it was never officially disclosed. The figure is the ceiling the dock's power budget permits, not a rate the console reaches only in bursts.
Clock frequency gpu provisional 307.2 MHz Confirmed Vendor-rated Nominal clock Published independently The 256 Maxwell cores of the shipped console, undocked, in its default power mode. Two fifths of the docked frequency, from the same sentence that gives the docked one, and provisional on the same single stating source. The two graphics rates are what separate this machine's two configurations; nothing else in the catalog's record of it differs between them.
Peak FP32 rate gpu provisional 393 GFLOP/s Rumored Theoretical Theoretical peak From community documentation Nintendo publishes no floating-point rate at any precision. Wikipedia states 393 GFLOP/s as the theoretical peak of the docked console, which is the higher of its two graphics clocks; the handheld mode runs slower. The figure names no precision and no vendor stands behind it, so it is rumored.
Memory capacity whole-system 4 294 967 296 B Confirmed Derived Design capacity Computed here from independently published figures Adds 1 memory-capacity figure obtained by design-capacity. Nothing in the catalog is left out of it. A total is only as trustworthy as the decision about what belongs in it, so both the terms and the exclusions are named records.
Rated power consumption whole-system 39 W Confirmed Derived Rated power Computed here from figures the vendor stated HAC-002 adapter at its rated 15.0 V output. Nintendo rates the adapter and never the console. The product of that rating is 39 W, and the gap between a rating and a machine is unusually visible here: Nintendo's own consoles disclosure reports about 7 W while actively gaming. The figure is reported because it is what the maker published, not because the console draws it.
Supply voltage whole-system 15.0 V Confirmed Vendor-rated Nameplate rating Stated by the vendor HAC-002 adapter, 15.0 V output mode. The same adapter also offers a 5.0 V mode at 1.5 A, which is not recorded here. The higher of the HAC-002 adapter's two output modes, from Nintendo's ecodesign disclosure. The 5.0 V mode exists for charging and cannot power the dock, so the 15.0 V pair is the one that describes the console running.
Supply current whole-system 2.6 A Confirmed Vendor-rated Nameplate rating Stated by the vendor HAC-002 adapter, 15.0 V output mode. The current Nintendo lists beside the 15.0 V mode. The rows are read pairwise: the 1.5 A figure belongs to the 5.0 V mode.
1 documented absence
Nintendo Switch: system figures: documented absences
Metric Value Evidence Basis Method Source
Memory bandwidth memory unknown Nintendo's technical specification page has no memory row, so it states neither a bandwidth nor the transfer rate and bus width one could be computed from. Not stated Theoretical Theoretical peak Stated by the vendor Nintendo publishes no memory figure of any kind for this console — not a capacity, not a width, not a rate — so there is nothing here to state or to compute from.

Figures for its components

Nintendo Switch unified memory
Metric Value Evidence Basis Method Source
Memory capacity memory 4 GiB Confirmed Vendor-rated Design capacity Published independently The LPDDR4 shared between the processor and the graphics units of the shipped console. Not Nintendo's figure: the specification page has no memory row at all. Two independent publications state the same capacity: one reproducing the developer specification it spends the article questioning row by row, and letting this row stand, the other stating it outright while reviewing the shipped console.

Derived figures and comparisons

Computed by this project rather than read from a source, and recomputed from their inputs on every build.

39 W

Formula
voltage × current power-from-voltage-current v1
Inputs
  • nintendo-switch Supply voltage: 15.0 V
  • nintendo-switch Supply current: 2.6 A
Rounding
half-up , 2 significant digits

Multiplies the two halves of a supply rating the maker published instead of a wattage. The arithmetic is exact for direct current — no power factor, nothing assumed — so this is not an estimate. It is still a rating and not a draw: a supply is specified for the worst case with headroom above it, and a machine at rest or at play may use a small fraction of it. Reported to 2 significant digits, the precision of the less precise of the two published figures.

4 294 967 296 B

Formula
a + b + … sum v1
Inputs
  • nintendo-switch-ram Memory capacity: 4 GiB
Rounding
none , 10 significant digits

Adds 1 memory-capacity figure obtained by design-capacity. Nothing in the catalog is left out of it. A total is only as trustworthy as the decision about what belongs in it, so both the terms and the exclusions are named records.

Sources