Nintendo Switch 2 units are already out in the wild, and it turns out that the console will require a day one update to run original Switch titles.
An individual had recently uploaded a six-second video of presumably themselves opening the top flap of the Nintendo Switch 2 box on YouTube. While it was barely an actual unboxing, the footage was swiftly taken down due to a copyright claim from the console maker. Twitter/X user Wario64 mentioned that another person shared evidence of also being in possession of a Nintendo Switch 2 unit with him, though he refrained from posting the pictures in public.
The individual with early access to the Nintendo Switch 2 told Wario64 that that the console requires a day one update in order to run original Switch games. When they try to boot a Switch title, they received a message prompt that read, “Please connect to the internet and update your system.” Similarly, the person who shared a six-second video of the console’s box being opened claimed that Nintendo had locked their unit, as it needed an update in order to function.
For details on the kind of improvements that can be expected from running original Switch titles on the Switch 2, follow the link here.
While we may not have a detailed look at the Nintendo Switch 2 box, we do have a recent analysis of the upcoming console’s SoC that offered a detailed benchmark of its CPU and GPU. The custom SoC, reportedly codenamed T239, is 207mm² in size, nearly double the Tegra X1 (118mm²) used in the original Switch. It’s even larger than chips like the RTX 3050 Ti (mobile), Apple’s M2, AMD’s Ryzen 7840H, and Qualcomm’s X Elite. The die is labeled with a 2021 tape-out date. The CPU section includes 8 Cortex-A78C cores, each with 256KB of L2 cache and a shared 4MB L3 cache, while the GPU is built around 6 TPCs with 2 SMs each, totaling 1,536 CUDA cores.
