Nintendo president confirms Change successor will probably be backward-compatible

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa stated that the corporate’s upcoming Change successor will probably be backward appropriate. However he did so with out saying something about what the Change 2 will probably be.

Meaning the brand new Change console, maybe dubbed the Change 2, will be capable of play video games from the older Change that debuted in 2017.

The Kyoto, Japan-based firm stated it expects to announce the following system within the monetary 12 months ending March 31, 2025, nevertheless it didn’t say extra.

“Nintendo Change is at the moment being performed with by many purchasers so we determined it might be optimum for them to have the ability to play their Change software program on the successor mannequin,” Furukawa stated, in accordance with Reuters.

Nintendo is certainly due for a brand new console, because the firm 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 very laborious to do with emulation expertise. In older days, it was value prohibitive. However it’s a lot simpler to do when there are massive 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 reminiscent of Nvidia.

That is hypothesis, however to me that signifies that the {hardware} within the Change 2 would seemingly be similar to the {hardware} within the Change, which makes use of a variant of the Nvidia Tegra processor. This is able to recommend that Nintendo goes with a console that improves on the processing energy of the most recent semiconductor expertise however doesn’t change the structure in a dramatic approach.

The Nvidia Tegra X1 Mariko processor is a system-on-chip, with loads 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 fashionable PC requirements, and it solely has 4GB of DRAM, or reminiscence for operating applications.

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 special structure after which run the Change software program by means of emulation. That may be costly, and Nintendo isn’t identified for spending some huge cash on {hardware}.

Relatively, it typically sells the most affordable 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.