News New Switch 2 specs show large performance dip in undocked mode

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While Nintendo offered an official spec sheet for the Switch 2 last month, neither it nor an accompanying blog post from chip-making partner Nvidia provided many specific numbers for the upcoming console's raw CPU and GPU horsepower. Today, though, Digital Foundry is offering what it calls "rock-solid confirmation" of the system's final tech specs, adding detail and clarity to years-old leaks and educated speculation on the system's internals (which turned out to be largely reliable in the end).

Unlike the Switch—which basically used an off-the-shelf Nvidia Tegra T1 chip—Digital Foundry says the Switch 2 is using "very much custom silicon designed specifically for Nintendo and for mobile gaming." You can see what that means in terms of raw hardware performance in the tables below.

Switch 2​	Switch​
Docked (Quality)​	Undocked (Performance)​	Docked (Quality)​	Undocked (Performance)​
CPU clock	998 Mhz​	1101 Mhz​	1020 Mhz​	1020 Mhz​
GPU clock	1007 Mhz​	561 Mhz​	768 Mhz​	460 Mhz​
Ray-tracing	20 gigarays/sec​	10 gigarays/sec​	N/A​	N/A​
Memory bandwidth	102GB/s​	68GB/s​	25.6GB/s​	21.3GB/s​

Switch 2​	Switch​
Total​	System (reserved)​	Total​	System (reserved)​
CPU cores	8​	2​	4​	1​
Memory	12GB (LPDDR5X)​	3GB​	4GB​	0.8GB​

Switch 2​	Switch​
CPU architecture	8x ARM Cortex A78C​	4x ARM Cortex A57​
GPU architecture	Ampere​	Maxwell​
CUDA Cores	1536​	256​
Memory interface	128-bit/LPDDR5​	64-bit/LPDDR4​

Glancing at those numbers, it's easy to pick out a large difference between the system's performance in docked and undocked modes; its CPU and GPU clocks and memory bandwidth all increase substantially when plugged into a TV. Those differences could help explain why the Switch 2 dock uses an active cooling fan, unlike the much simpler TV-connection dock on the original Switch.

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