The Switch was a lucky *accident*. Nvidia's Tegra project had become a massive white elephant, with Nvidia having an insane amount of unsold unwanted Tegra chips. The Nvidia found it could unload this pile of tech junk to Nvidia with *zero* work, and the Switch was born.
I'm sure providing a good deal of the switch sw ecosystem accounts for *some* work..
The Tegra in the Switch was the best Nvidia had designed, and the first with a fully PC like capable GPU.
Tegras have been 'fully PC like' since TK1 -- the Kepler-based tegra.
And the first Tegra with sufficient power efficiency to be no-compromise mobile. But it was a financial disaster for Nvidia- and *the end of the road*.
..That's why tegra was in Teslas up until last year, and in several other huge brands currently, and nvidia is currently pushing it for IoT AI against the likes of Google and Intel? Regardless, nvidia have a sufficient park of tegras past TX1 that they could put in a mobile chassis, with minor customisations -- e.g. TX .. wait for it.. 2!
No- Nvidia ain't wasting money on a zero profit cost plus new chip for Nintendo. Nvidia *hates* the console biz. I'll dump unsold stock, of course- but it won't do an AMD.
Nindeno don't need nvidia doing an AMD for them.
So where does the Switch go? AMD or nowhere. And these days AMD is all APU in the mobile space- and AMD's APU have yet to match the power efficiency of that Tegra. An ARM based APU from AMD is possible but very very unlikely. Unlike Nvidia, AMD never bothered to advance its ARM skills.
The heck is 'ARM skills'? You're aware arm licences off-the-shelf CPU IP (along with GPU IP) to anybody willing to pay, right? And AMD bothered quite a bit with arm, given how they released a server chip some years ago. Not a particularly successful one, but they de-proritized it themselves right before going all in with zen. But that's irrelevant, Nintendo are not switching platforms after their most-successfull console past wii -- that would be idiotic.
A Zen2 based update for Switch is possible but unlikely until AMD has much more success in the ultra mobile arena.
So what makes it possible then?
Unlike Sony and Microsoft- Nintendo doesn't 'waste' money on engineers or anything else- Nintendo relies on *brand* effect and suckers who'll pay top dollar for yesterday's tech. Going with the pre-existing Tegra was Nintendo's cheapest act yet- and bodes poorly for their future hardware.
I'm sure you thought that sounded cool in your head.. Now go and re-think it until it passes a basic cohesion test (hint: nintendo do quite a lot of engineering; the fact they don't design chips does not position them below the rest of the vendors who also don't design chips or just design peripherals: the days of SCE designing chips are long gone, now they're 'semi-custom' clients like the next guy).
I'd guess they might have bought a 'shrink' of the current Tegra- an otherwise unchanged chip that will clock a little faster. But Nintendo ain't Apple- at least Apple gives you bleeding edge inhouse new tech for your top dollar. Nintendo gives you *nothing*.
Sounds to me like nintendo gave you a little something, at least.. A dead dog or perhaps a squirrel?