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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

The developer Switch does appear to be different hardware, although we don't know the full extent of the differences yet.

Nintendo accidentally showed a devkit with 64GB of internal storage rather than the 32GB you get on retail units.

https://twitter.com/_ferrums/status/826816397238030337

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Why do they do that kind of thing? If anything, you might expect them to include less RAM & storage so that you're forced to work under tighter limitations.

Having more powerful hardware allows you to focus on designing/building the game and delay optimization until the game is mostly finished.

I think that having the same hardware would be logic, but I feel that running (especially a game) in debug mode would in fact require more memory...

I can see using the same specs, but using even less would be weird. You don't win any points if you use less memory than the hardware has.

There is no reason to work under tighter constraints. You want developers to be able to push the retail version of the hardware to the limits. In order to do that and still be able to run debug builds you need the dev kit to be more powerful than the retail version.

It's so you can leave debug symbols in your executable: for a release you'll strip your binaries and pack them quite tight. For developing you'd like to have more uncompressed data in ram, and you want full debug symbols and debug info on the stack. Not to mention that debuggers themselves take a non-zero amount of ram.

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