Nintendo president confirms Switch successor will be backward-compatible

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said that the company’s upcoming Switch successor will be backward compatible. But he did so without saying anything about what the Switch 2 will be.

That means the new Switch console, perhaps dubbed the Switch 2, will be able to play games from the older Switch that debuted in 2017.

The Kyoto, Japan-based company said it expects to announce the next device in the financial year ending March 31, 2025, but it did not say more.

“Nintendo Switch is currently being played with by many customers so we decided it would be optimal for them to be able to play their Switch software on the successor model,” Furukawa said, according to Reuters.

Nintendo is definitely due for a new console, as the company just reported its revenues were down 34% in the first six months of its fiscal year. For the period ending September 30, Nintendo lowered its forecast for how many Switch units would sell by March of next year from 13.5 million to 12.5 million.

Backward compatibility

Backward compatibility used to be very hard to do with emulation technology. In older days, it was cost prohibitive. But it is much easier to do when there are big gaps in processing power from the older tech to the newer tech. And it’s easier to do backward compatibility if Nintendo stays with its current hardware architecture, using the same key vendors such as Nvidia.

This is speculation, but to me that means that the hardware in the Switch 2 would likely be very similar to the hardware in the Switch, which uses a variant of the Nvidia Tegra processor. This would suggest that Nintendo is going with a console that improves on the processing power of the latest semiconductor technology but does not change the architecture in a dramatic way.

The Nvidia Tegra X1 Mariko processor is a system-on-chip, with a lot of components woven into the same piece of silicon. It has four 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 pretty archaic by modern PC standards, and it only has 4GB of DRAM, or memory for running programs.

My guess is that the upgraded version for the Switch 2 will have the same Arm-based tech to make it easy to run Switch games on the new device. I doubt that Nintendo would make a complex chip based on a different architecture and then run the Switch software through emulation. That would be expensive, and Nintendo isn’t known for spending a lot of money on hardware.

Rather, it often sells the cheapest game console compared to its rivals and it has the lowest processing power too. And it still gives its rivals a run for the money by coming up with something like the Switch, which has sold 146 million units compared to 61.8 million for the Sony PlayStation 5 and 27.7 million for the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S.