[MBCook]

True. But the newer consoles in those cases were huge leaps over the older one.

ARM has 100% backwards compatible CPUs that Nintendo could use. They’ve done backwards compatibility a number of times now without needing to embed an entire extra CPU such as the Wii and the Wii U. I would be surprised if they weren’t thinking about it when they were designing the Switch.

The “embed the old console“ thing always works, but why go that far if there’s a much simpler option?

[sylware]

Well, not paying the ARM royalites is enough to motivate them to perform the jump. But Nintendo is japanese and softbank, ARM "owner", is japanese too, namely high level country interests would short circuit everything.