Nintendo Switch
The Nintendo Switch is a console manufactured and released by Nintendo on March 3rd, 2017, as their second entry into the eighth generation of video game consoles. It is their most recent family of consoles, and succeeds the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U families of systems.
This console is equipped with a dock to facilitate home-console gameplay on an external display, while also serving as a handheld device poised with detachable controllers (dubbed as Joy-Con controllers) for use when disconnected from the dock.
As of 2022, the Nintendo Switch has surpassed the Nintendo Wii in sales, making it Nintendo's best selling console in its history.
In the same year, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa described the Nintendo Switch as being "in the middle of its lifecycle", implying that official support will persist for the foreseeable future.
Hardware
Powered primarily by its Tegra X1 line of SoCs (system on a chip processors), the Nintendo Switch is a midrange gaming tablet and was, at the time of release, the most powerful handheld to date released by a dedicated gaming company. There have been four main hardware revisions ever since the initial release, mainly in relation to the Tegra X1 system on a chip (SoC).
Tegra X1
While there are three major revisions to the Tegra X1, there are no performance differences employed by Nintendo in practice. As the Tegra X1+ uses a smaller process node (20nm to 16nm), it is, by proxy, more energy efficient, leading to cooler thermals and longer battery life. Nintendo has dubbed consoles using the Tegra X1+ as HAC-001(+01) units.
The Tegra X1 uses effectively a quad-core CPU consisting of 4x Cortex A57s. There are four Cortex A53s present, but they are disabled. This most likely would have been used in a big.LITTLE configuration like modern Snapdragon SoCs. The Google Pixel C, which uses the Tegra X1, also has these cores disabled.
There are two major revisions of this chip. There is one minor revision used in the Nintendo Switch with a bootrom IRAM patch used to mitigate fusee-gelee.
Erista (T210)
This is the only model of the Tegra X1 vulnerable to CVE-2018-6242 (known as fusee-gelee or ShofEL2).
The Tegra T210 is the original model of the processor, released in 2015 by Nvidia and used in the original 2017 model of the Nintendo Switch. This SoC is codenamed Erista, and has drastically higher power draw compared to the Tegra T214.
In mid-2019, Nintendo began shipping units with a modified bootrom IRAM patch (ipatch) written at the factory, effectively mitigating CVE-2018-6242, and largely patching out the main community entrypoint for custom firmware access. These, alongside Mariko units, are commonly referred to as "patched units".
The CPU uses four ARMv8 ARM Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 1GHz in Horizon (docked or handheld), but officially supports clock speeds up to 1.9GHz.
The GPU scales from 384MHz in handheld mode to 768MHz in docked mode, but officially supports speeds up to 921MHz.
Mariko (T214)
This revision was introduced starting in August 2019 with the HAC-001(-01) and Nintendo Switch Lite (HDH-001). Regardless of model, every Switch console manufactured after mid-2019 is a Mariko unit.
It uses nearly half of the wattage as the original console to run its software, thereby producing less heat and providing a longer battery life as a result.
Also known as the T210B01 revision, the T214 is capable of hitting higher clock frequencies without thermal throttling, and therefore can effectively serve as a more powerful SoC, if Nintendo ever chose to go this route. The homebrew community has managed to overclock the CPU of Mariko chips up to 2397MHz, and the GPU to 1305MHz.
The bootROM has undergone a full rewrite, so CVE-2018-6242 is no longer present in any capacity and cannot be reintroduced in any form. By definition, these are also patched units, but the community often explicitly refers to them as Mariko units to differentiate from patched Erista units.
Horizon
Horizon (herein referred to as HOS or HorizonNX) is a heavy rewrite and reimagining of the Nintendo 3DS operating system of the same name. Synonymous system calls and security concepts are present. Given the timeframe the OS was developed in (early 2015 to early 2017), this explains how Nintendo pushed out a fully-functional OS this quickly.
| Revision | Codename | Release Date | Exploitable | MSRP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nintendo Switch | HAC-001 | 2017/03/03 | Software | $299.99 |
| Nintendo Switch | HAC-001(-01), HAD | 2019/08 | Modchip | $299.99 |
| Nintendo Switch Lite | HDH-001 | 2019/09/20 | Modchip | $199.99 |
| Nintendo Switch (OLED Model) | HEG-001, Aula | 2021/10/08 | Modchip | $349.99 |
Trivia
- The Nintendo Switch name was finalised in 2014, two years before the console's name was revealed in October 2016.