Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa mentioned that the corporate’s upcoming Change successor shall be backward suitable. However he did so with out saying something about what the Change 2 shall be.
Which means the brand new Change console, maybe dubbed the Change 2, will be capable of play video games from the older Change that debuted in 2017.
The Kyoto, Japan-based firm mentioned it expects to announce the subsequent gadget within the monetary yr ending March 31, 2025, but it surely didn’t say extra.
“Nintendo Change is at the moment being performed with by many shoppers so we determined it will be optimum for them to have the ability to play their Change software program on the successor mannequin,” Furukawa mentioned, in accordance with Reuters.
Nintendo is unquestionably due for a brand new console, because the firm simply reported its revenues had been down 34% within the first six months of its fiscal yr. For the interval ending September 30, Nintendo lowered its forecast for what number of Change models would promote by March of subsequent yr from 13.5 million to 12.5 million.
Backward compatibility
Backward compatibility was very onerous to do with emulation know-how. In older days, it was value prohibitive. However it’s a lot simpler to do when there are massive gaps in processing energy from the older tech to the newer tech. And it’s simpler to do backward compatibility if Nintendo stays with its present {hardware} structure, utilizing the identical key distributors akin to Nvidia.
That is hypothesis, however to me that signifies that the {hardware} within the Change 2 would possible be similar to the {hardware} within the Change, which makes use of a variant of the Nvidia Tegra processor. This may counsel that Nintendo goes with a console that improves on the processing energy of the newest semiconductor know-how however doesn’t change the structure in a dramatic manner.
The Nvidia Tegra X1 Mariko processor is a system-on-chip, with lots of parts woven into the identical piece of silicon. It has 4 Arm-based Cortex A57 cores, with a max of 2GHz. The Nvidia GPU has 256 CUDA cores, with a max of 1GHz. It’s a second-generation Maxwell chip, which is fairly archaic by trendy PC requirements, and it solely has 4GB of DRAM, or reminiscence for working packages.
My guess is that the upgraded model for the Change 2 could have the identical Arm-based tech to make it simple to run Change video games on the brand new gadget. I doubt that Nintendo would make a posh chip primarily based on a unique structure after which run the Change software program by way of emulation. That will be costly, and Nintendo isn’t identified for spending some huge cash on {hardware}.
Relatively, it usually sells the most affordable sport console in comparison with its rivals and it has the bottom processing energy too. And it nonetheless offers its rivals a run for the cash by developing with one thing just like the Change, which has bought 146 million models in comparison with 61.8 million for the Sony PlayStation 5 and 27.7 million for the Microsoft Xbox Sequence X/S.
