> Where I have zero idea is why they went for NVIDIA Tegra that was originally aimed at automotive and settop boxes instead of Qualcomm, Samsung or Mediatek I

> Where I have zero idea is why they went for NVIDIA Tegra that was originally aimed at automotive and settop boxes instead of Qualcomm, Samsung or Mediatek I think a big part of this comes down to two things: 1. If you’re Nintendo, the Tegra X1 was the fastest mobile graphics chip available. Mali and Adreno weren’t anywhere close at the time. The alternative would’ve required shipping a Switch less powerful than the already-derided Wii U, which just was not an option. 2. Nintendo uses their own, in-house operating system that fits into under 400MB and runs on a microkernel. Naturally, you want good GPU drivers. NVIDIA’s philosophy is to basically make a binary blob with a shim for each OS. Not great, but it demonstrably shows the drivers can be ported with fairly little effort - Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, whatever. Qualcomm and MediaTek’s strategy is to make a bastard fork of the Linux kernel and, maybe, upstream some stuff later, with a particular interest in Android compatibility. I think it goes without saying, that the implementation which isn’t tied to a specific kernel, is a more desirable starting point.