One of the things that Nintendo sold their new console the Switch with was a lot of talking up the components inside of it. One of those was a claim to having a processor that was a custom design. Only, here’s the thing – it might not be as custom as they made it sound.

Hardware analysis site Tech Insights has updated their Nintendo Switch teardown with some photography of the console’s processor, a Tegra which as I said Nintendo have promoted as being a custom design. Only upon inspection the site has determined that it seems the configuration of it is awfully similar to the standard Tegra X1, as can be seen in the Shield Android TV. It’s pretty much the same as the one found inside the 2017 revised version of the Shield Android TV, right down to the same assortment of the surface-mounted capacitors surrounding the processor. Which can lead a lot of people to ask what exactly was meant by a ‘custom design’ in the first place.

The one place its talked about is a blog post by Nvidia on the Switch, in which they talked up the processor. Although the blog post does cover more than the hardware of the console, talking about the system design, system software, APIs, game engines and peripherals as well – so possibly by ‘custom design’ they meant the way they’ve gotten it to function inside of the console to play games. The Shield Android TV is much less able to handle gaming framerates than the Switch has so far proven to, so maybe the custom design was focused on getting enough out of the processor to achieve this.

Of course, when you talk about a ‘custom design’ it makes it sound as if the processor was specially designed for the Switch and from the looks of it this is clearly not the case here. Whether or not this was intentional we can’t ever know, but it is easy to see how you could read the statement both ways given the facts.