Nintendo is traditionally very stingy about sharing specs for its systems- and with the Switch, that hasn’t changed. So it’s been left to teardowns from third parties to figure out exactly what it is that makes Nintendo’s newest device click.
As it turns out? It’s not all that spectacular. Pull the curtains back, and you find out that the Switch runs on a stock NVIDIA Tegra X1 CPU and GM208 Maxwell GPU. This appears to contradict Nvidia’s assertions that its chip powering the Switch is ‘custom’- so far, no customizations have been discovered.
In terms of hard power, what does this mean? This means that the Switch is more powerful than the Wii U (and Xbox 360 and PS3), but not as powerful as the Xbox One (and so, not as powerful as PS4 or PS4 Pro either). This is about what we expected, and it reinforces that as a handheld, the Switch is a wonderful device- as a console, it’s found a fair bit lacking.