Hardware Mariko chip speculation

[willfr]

I do think 'Mariko' is probably a die shrink, but there could be more changes. I've heard that the 4 'little' cores in the X1 are disabled because of a manufacturing or design issue. If true, could they be omitted entirely from Mariko, perhaps to reduce costs? Also, how likely is a bump in GPU frequency? At least when the Mariko Switch is docked, I see no reason to not increase the GPU frequency (assuming Mariko is in fact a die shrink). I've also read on here the fan could be disabled when the Mariko Switch is not docked (again, this suggests a die shrink). Would love to hear what everyone else thinks!

 

[b_dasher]

The most I'd expect to see would be maybe a fanless "slim" style thing with maybe clock speeds always running in docked mode and with a 1080p screen thanks to a die shrink but it will probably be just a die shrink that greatly reduces or removes the need for active cooling. Probably not a more powerful chip and I would rather Nintendo hold back the upgrades to make the actual successor for the switch seem more of an upgrade.

 

[willfr]

I can't see them bumping the CPU frequency though, because apparently that would require every existing game to do a lot of modifications, and developers are already complaining about having to effectively make 2 versions of their game on the existing Switch (1 version is for docked, the other version for undocked). So that would be asking too much because each game would need pretty much 4 versions: T210 docked, T210 undocked, T214 docked and T214 undocked