Report: A new Nintendo Switch with 4K support is in development for 2021

Two reports have come out in the last 24 hours claiming that Nintendo are gearing up for an enhanced Nintendo Switch version, due for release in early 2021.

The first report comes from Taipei newspaper Economic Daily News, who stated that the new Switch featuring upgraded interactivity and an improved display will enter production this year with a planned launch in Q1 2021. They cite sources in hardware manufacturers handling the Switch flash memory, Joy-Con controllers and more. This was followed by Bloomberg, who surprisingly claim that the updated console specs have yet to be finalised, but that it could have increased power that supports up to 4K output.

That the specs and targets have yet to be finalised is quite difficult to believe given the timescale on which console hardware takes place, so add a pinch of salt to this report. Certainly there will not be any major semi-custom chipset changes (which take years to produce), but it could be that Nintendo and their partners are seeing how the early production chips are holding up in terms of yield and how highly they can be clocked. Bear in mind that we’re now just 7 months away from the end of Q1 2021, and the finalised hardware specs for both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X were already known a distance before their Holiday 2020 release.

However, there have been long-standing reports and rumours of an upgraded and more powerful Nintendo Switch being in development. Speculation was initially that Nintendo would release both the Switch Lite and a Switch Pro in 2019, though in the end they only released one new model (and revised the internals of the original Switch design for better battery life). Naturally, analysts then shifted their expectations to 2020 and speculated that Nintendo would boost their hardware power to counter the launch of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. At the start of this year, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa stated quite unequivocally that there will not be a Switch Pro release in 2020.

But… he never said anything about 2021, did he?

Early 2021 would be around 4 years on from the original release of Nintendo’s blockbusting hybrid console, with the company well known for producing mid-generation upgrades and console redesigns. This goes all the way back to the original Game Boy, with the Game Boy Color released as an enhanced version of the iconic handheld, and while the Game Boy Advance only shifted form factors multiple times, the Nintendo DS was superceded by the enhanced DSi, and the Nintendo 3DS by the New Nintendo 3DS. The company has been more conservative with their home consoles, but with the Nintendo Switch being a handheld hybrid console and based of a mobile tablet chipset, there’s more than enough scope for an upgrade.

How they get there will be fascinating to see. The original Nintendo Switch was released in 2017 using the already two years old Tegra X1 chipset from Nvidia. Last year saw them work with Nvidia on a more efficient iteration of the chip on a smaller process to help them create the Nintendo Switch Lite and increase the battery life of the original design, but Nvidia’s SoC designs have pivoted away from tablet computing toward machine learning and self-driving vehicles.

With the success of the Nintendo Switch reviving the company’s financials, they could more reasonably invest more in customising the chipset, in stead of picking an off-the-shelf part like the Tegra X1. There’s several advances that they could make use of, from jumping to TSMC’s increasingly popular 7nm process for even greater power efficiency, to combining more modern ARM CPU cores with a more recent Nvidia GPU architecture. Of course, flawless backward compatibility to all the existing Nintendo Switch games would be a concern, but not an insurmountable problem. It’s dependent on how far Nintendo want to go to lengthen their current generation of console.

Source: Economic Daily News, Bloomberg via VGC