Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa mentioned that the corporate’s upcoming Change successor might be backward appropriate. However he did so with out saying something about what the Change 2 might be.
Which means the brand new Change console, maybe dubbed the Change 2, will have the ability to play video games from the older Change that debuted in 2017.
The Kyoto, Japan-based firm mentioned it expects to announce the subsequent system within the monetary 12 months ending March 31, 2025, but it surely didn’t say extra.
“Nintendo Change is at the moment being performed with by many purchasers so we determined it will be optimum for them to have the ability to play their Change software program on the successor mannequin,” Furukawa mentioned, in line with Reuters.
Nintendo is certainly due for a brand new console, as the corporate simply reported its revenues had been down 34% within the first six months of its fiscal 12 months. For the interval ending September 30, Nintendo lowered its forecast for what number of Change models would promote by March of subsequent 12 months from 13.5 million to 12.5 million.
Backward compatibility
Backward compatibility was once very laborious to do with emulation know-how. In older days, it was price prohibitive. However it’s a lot simpler to do when there are large gaps in processing energy from the older tech to the newer tech. And it’s simpler to do backward compatibility if Nintendo stays with its present {hardware} structure, utilizing the identical key distributors similar to Nvidia.
That is hypothesis, however to me that signifies that the {hardware} within the Change 2 would probably be similar to the {hardware} within the Change, which makes use of a variant of the Nvidia Tegra processor. This is able to counsel that Nintendo goes with a console that improves on the processing energy of the most recent semiconductor know-how however doesn’t change the structure in a dramatic approach.
The Nvidia Tegra X1 Mariko processor is a system-on-chip, with quite a lot of elements woven into the identical piece of silicon. It has 4 Arm-based Cortex A57 cores, with a max of 2GHz. The Nvidia GPU has 256 CUDA cores, with a max of 1GHz. It’s a second-generation Maxwell chip, which is fairly archaic by trendy PC requirements, and it solely has 4GB of DRAM, or reminiscence for operating packages.
My guess is that the upgraded model for the Change 2 may have the identical Arm-based tech to make it simple to run Change video games on the brand new system. I doubt that Nintendo would make a posh chip based mostly on a unique structure after which run the Change software program via emulation. That may be costly, and Nintendo isn’t identified for spending some huge cash on {hardware}.
Slightly, it typically sells the most cost effective recreation console in comparison with its rivals and it has the bottom processing energy too. And it nonetheless provides its rivals a run for the cash by arising with one thing just like the Change, which has offered 146 million models in comparison with 61.8 million for the Sony PlayStation 5 and 27.7 million for the Microsoft Xbox Collection X/S.
