I can't say I have very much faith in this article. Here's a line from it:
As I'm sure anyone in this thread knows, the Switch hasn't used the 20nm TX1 since 2019. If they don't even know what chip the Switch is actually using then I can't place a whole lot of trust in their claim that it's going out of production.
As an aside, I think a lot of this discussion of Switch chips going out of production is based on a misunderstanding between the original 20nm TX1 and the 16nm/12nm Mariko/TX1+. The original 20nm TX1 reached end-of-life in January,
according to Nvidia, however they list Jetson Nano as being available until 2025. That means they can't possibly be terminating Mariko/TX1+ production this year, as they've committed to keeping Jetson Nano available for another 4 years, and they can't do that without TX1 chips (which don't exist any more) or Mariko chips. I think some people have seen the TX1 reaching end of life and, not realising the distinction between it and Mariko, are erroneously reporting that "Switch's SoC is ending production" when the actual SoC Switch currently uses is still very much in production. Not everyone keeps up on the minutia of die shrinks and revisions of console SoCs, so it's hardly that surprising.
That doesn't mean Nintendo is going to keep using Mariko for any particular length of time; they could drop it later this year and Nvidia would simply keep a trickle of production going for Jetson Nano, but they can also keep using it for as long as they want.
Yeah, if there's a new $299 model this year then they're obviously not going to replace it at the same price point six months later. My guess would be $399 for the more powerful model in that case, as a $50 difference seems very low given the performance gap. Also agreed that a new OLED Switch model could come sooner than we expect if it's still using Mariko. Judging by Bloomberg's timeline for the OLED panels, September's a distinct possibility.
Well, as I said above I'm not particularly convinced that Mariko production is ending, and we could be reading too much into the code names. It could be, for example, that models compatible with the original 1080p dock start with I, but models which are compatible with the new HDMI 2.1 dock start with A? It could be loads of things, but looking for patterns with a single digit number of examples and then being confused when new data doesn't fit that pattern isn't anything new. :)
