The new console uses a "custom Tegra processor" from Nvidia, confirming months of rumors. Nvidia has declined to give us the chip's name or provide any specs, but many rumors point to it being either a "Tegra X2" or a very close relative. (Also worth noting: Digital Foundry claims devkits are running a slightly older Tegra X1.)

The X2 is also known as "Parker," and we know a few things about it. Anandtech reports that it uses a total of six ARM CPU cores, two custom Nvidia-designed "Denver" cores, and four off-the-shelf ARM Cortex A57 cores. All six cores use a 64-bit architecture, but the A57 is old news at this point—it showed up in high-end phone CPUs throughout 2015, including Samsung's Exynos 7 series and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810, and it has since been superseded twice by Cortex A72 and A73. They're still reasonably capable performers, but the Denver cores will be responsible for most of the heavy lifting—previous-generation Denver cores have been about twice as fast as A57 cores at similar clock speeds.

It's hard to say just how the Switch will perform based on these numbers, since performance doesn't always scale perfectly and there are other factors—CPU speed, memory bandwidth, and the Switch's proprietary Nvidia-developed "NVN" graphics API, for instance—that we can't account for. But you shouldn't expect the Switch to perform on the same level as the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One. Both of those systems have dedicated-class GPUs with fast RAM and much larger cooling systems, and even though their architectures are older, they're still going to be much more capable than an SoC like Tegra.