Images of what appears to be a teardown of a Nintendo Switch began circulating around the Internet on February 19. While it is impossible at this point to confirm the legitimacy of these images, the hardware pictured appears to have required some remarkable design and engineering chops. And several of the design points raise our confidence that these images are of the real thing—or at least of a prototype.

The leaked images of this possible Nintendo Switch contain a Chinese game-parts manufacturer's watermark. The device seen here puts component density first and foremost, with a lithium-ion battery that takes up nearly half of the hardware's footprint. Nintendo has previously confirmed that the Switch's battery will measure 4310 mAh, and that measure is printed on the battery seen in these images (which is also coated with some kind of foam, perhaps meant for both protection and heat management).

Curiously, however, this battery has its supplier's name listed on a visible sticker, which is a change of pace for Nintendo. The company's 3DS line of systems has used much crisper labels for its batteries, which also hide their exact manufacturing origins beyond "made in China." This possible Switch, on the other hand, has tapped Amperex for battery manufacturing duties. If that name sounds familiar, then you have been keeping up with Samsung's Note 7 debacle. The lack of an official Nintendo label may be due to this being prototype hardware, or because, unlike the 3DS, the Switch is not designed for easy battery replacement.

The images otherwise confirm a sizable fan—about the same size as the Switch's cartridge slot—along with an L-shaped circuit board that holds, among other components, an Nvidia-manufactured SoC and two possible DIMMs of RAM (with no helpful labels clarifying their size, speed, or other specs; based on known specs, these could be two DIMMs of 2GB RAM each). Importantly, this teardown shows ribbons at the exact points that the removable Joy-Con controllers would interface with the system when attached in its "portable" mode. A USB Type-C slot on the circuit board is positioned to accept the double-duty task of receiving power and transmitting external video when the Switch is docked in a TV stand, and the rest of the components appear to fit quite snugly in the system's thin footprint (whose measurements still haven't been confirmed, other than a 6.2" diagonal on the touchscreen).

If this Nvidia chip is legitimate, then its printed code is interesting, because it contains a code label of "UDNX02-A2." We know the Switch is set to contain a Tegra chip, and we had been led to believe that this would be much like the X1 found in Nvidia's Shield devices. But this "A2" designation, unlike the "A1" printed on existing X1 chips, could mean we're getting a significant change to the design.

That may very well be a shrink to a 16nm process, or we could actually be getting a surprise bump from the older Maxwell architecture to the newer Pascal. The latter seems rather unlikely, however, based on known Switch specifications that developers are designing to.

We're only a few weeks out from far more comprehensive Switch teardowns. We'll be sure to let you know the moment someone less anonymous voids their warranty and parcels out every Switch component.

Listing image by Baidu user