© Nintendo LifeNvidia, the company that produces the “Mariko Tegra X1 system on a chip” that powers both the Switch and the Switch Lite, would have finished production of the SoC this year, fueling more speculation about the fact that a Switch Pro is on its way.
The news comes from Gamereactor, who has spoken to a source close to the issue. The source claims that production of the Tegra X1 Mariko will end in 2021, but did not detail which chip would replace it in Nintendo’s supply chain.
It’s fair to assume that Nintendo will make sure it has a healthy stock of Mariko Tegra X1 chips before production ends, but he asks us: if the report is true and Nintendo believes the Switch is only halfway through its life, what happens beyond this year?
A logical answer would be that Nintendo would progressively eliminate the original Switch model and its ‘Lite’ brother in favor of newer versions of both models, as it did with the 3DS and 2DS when the New 3DS became available and the New 2DS.
Although the Switch Pro has not yet been officially confirmed and Nintendo has stated that it has no plans for new hardware in the near future, a report that it has placed a large order for OLED panels manufactured by Samsung suggests that there is a Updated hardware SKU in fact, by the way; an improved SoC manufactured by Nvidia would be a fairly reasonable inclusion to expect if the console will offer an increase in performance over the original version.
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