Well RTX is not really a good fit for mobile IMO, however Turing itself has separated from Tensor and RT cores via the GTX 1660/1650 series GPUs. A Tegra based on Turing is due out this year as well, as all architectures seem to get a Tegra version in the year following the release of the architecture and Turing was released in October? last year. Anyways with Turing as the only Nvidia architecture on 12nm, it is also cheaper for Nintendo and Nvidia to simply put that in the Switch, it isn't any bigger than Pascal or Maxwell cores either. Some people hear that and they think I'm talking about some drastic departure into some crazy spec thing, but really it just makes sense for both Nintendo and Nvidia to use Turing at the same expected performance level of this Switch Pro we've been talking about for pages. Thats somewhere between 800 and 944 gflops, whether it's Maxwell/Pascal or Turing doesn't change much at all, though it would offer better async compute and variable shader support.
As for timeline of the Switch 'Pro2', I'd assume they are going for 3 year cycles, the original Switch was going to launch holiday 2016, there wasn't enough software ready for them, so they pushed it to march 2017, but had they stayed with Holiday 2016, and launch the pro model this holiday, then we can clearly see the 3 year pattern start to make sense. 3 years also benefits Nintendo in another way, ARM CPUs are designed by 3 separate teams, with the A73 team set to release their new version next year, perfect timing for Nintendo to build around it on the 'Pro2' the reason this CPU is important, is the team makes the most efficient versions of the high performance core, A75 is faster and A76 team is the primary team that always has the drastic increase in performance, but A73 team might announce an A77 next year that is smaller than the A76, and offers higher clocks at lower power draw... It's not a done deal, but it's what I expect.
Nvidia has a 20 year plan with Nintendo, they built the API, helped with the drivers, firmware, design, devkits and ecosystem... Nvidia is likely not going anywhere, and with the success of the Nintendo Switch, I don't think Nintendo has any plans to move away from Nvidia either. They are the leader in graphics hardware anyways, so everyone else doesn't have much to offer. I expect Tegra to continue to get these architecture updates and for Nintendo to use a new one every 3 years. Having said that, I think they will use that SCD patent as a full fledged console that has a docking station for the Switch unit, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Switch when docked offers it's GPU as a physX co processor.
Sorry for the long post, but I do think it has a lot of insight into what is going on:
I've even thought about the type of hardware Nvidia and Nintendo would likely use in a standalone console with dock, I think they would use what I expect is a RTX 3070 (The reason I choose a RTX 3070, is that with the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 is the same 445mm^2 TU106 chip, the 2060 just has a ton of disabled hardware, something I don't think Nintendo and Nvidia would want to do on a chip they are shipping millions and millions of, it's more likely that Nvidia would use bad GPU chips from this line to sell the RTX 3060 at a very nice $299-$349 price point)
Firstly, I'd expect Nintendo and Nvidia to put a high powered CPU in this, something like a 12 core A76 with 4 A55 cores (DynamIQ uses 8 core clusters and can have 6 big cores with 2 little cores, all operating with their own voltages and frequency), likely clocked at 2.5GHz or better, 7nm+ process node with 24GB of GDDR6 RAM.
The RTX 3070 here would be between a RTX 2070 and RTX 2080, so 2560 Cuda Cores, 320 Tensor cores and 40 RT cores, this means it is fully capable of ray tracing, and because it's a 7nm+ Nvidia GPU, it should have no problem hitting 2GHz in a console, which is where I'd put this GPU. Of course it doesn't exist yet, but I think Nintendo and Nvidia could release this powered Switch console with docking station for $399 in Holiday 2021, and at 2GHz GPU that I listed above, it would have 10.24TFLOPs from a Turing level GPU, that should match up very well with the rumored 14TFLOPs AMD powered next gen consoles.
Great thing about this timing is that Holiday 2021 is a year after PS5/XBnext are expected to launch, offers a competitive price and performance, as well as a 4K solution, something that the Switch form factor will never really be able to efficiently be able to offer it's customers and something Nintendo has said they would do when that resolution became more relevant. It also is a year before they release a Switch 'Pro2' and a year before PS4/XB1 become irrelevant. I also expect the 'Pro2' to offer a non raytracing 1080p performance when docked in the standard dock, 720p when portable and be used as a physX co processor when docked in the Switch console I'm speculating above. That means that I expect the 'pro2' to offer over 2TFLOPs of performance when docked.
If Nintendo goes with this iteration strategy, they have 3 price points, $199 for the Switch handheld, $299 for the Switch hybrid, $399 for the Switch console... This also keeps things simple compared to PC, it's all generally the same API / dev environment, with only a handful of different performance targets, by 2022 there is really only the 4K ~10TFLOPs, 1080p ~2.3TFLOPs, 720p ~900gflops, 480p ~400gflops (which the current Switch can achieve), of course devs are free to use the lower powered modes of 157-196gflops that the current Switch offers and all future versions of the Switch will likely offer for backwards compatibility. I love looking into the future like this so sorry for anyone still reading this, but I do think this is Nintendo's future with Nvidia, they tipped their hand when Eurogamer showed original clock speeds for the Switch in docked and portable mode, offering a 2.5:1 ratio, a similar ratio needed for 1080:720 and 720:480 exists as ~2.25:1. That is why this is all possible, of course 4K requires 4:1 to reach 4K:1080p, so it's just not something that can be reasonably covered via GPU clock speeds, thus a separate more power hungry device will be required when Nintendo does finally address 4K.
Iwata:
"I am not sure if the form factor (the size and configuration of the hardware) will be integrated," he said. "In contrast, the number of form factors might increase."
"Currently, we can only provide two form factors because if we had three or four different architectures, we would face serious shortages of software on every platform," he said. But if Nintendo had one unified platform like Apple's iOS, Iwata said, it could actually create more than just two different game machines each cycle. "To cite a specific case, Apple is able to release smart devices with various form factors one after another because there is one way of programming adopted by all platforms."
