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Valve still waiting on a 'generational leap' for Steam Deck 2 - but it's coming
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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Its gonna be ARM based. Just no other way to get the power to performance. Maybe some of the AMD architectures. Also, expect soldered RAM.
people overexagerate the power efficiency of arm because of controlled environments. for gaming handheld workloads x86 is more than enough.
Snapdragon on windows has already shown(ignoring games that outright dont work) then when under a gaming load, the efficiency gains arent there.
Another example that its not a magic bullet in terms of strictly hardware is the M1 in non OSX environments. If you look at the M1's efficiency while using Asahi Linux (a distro of linux specifically tailored to apple m series cpus), it does not remotely get the same kind of battery life as it does in OSX. Its why for example, the steam decks battery lofe reletive to size is better than windows handhelds.the bottleneck wasnt the hardware but more the OS
what valve really wants is if they could get a handheld with only AMD C cores (that is power efficient cores with less cache but like 70% of the size of a full core) such that the power budget would go to the iGPU more than the CPU, as a majority of games are gpu limited in performance rather than CPU. AMD just has never made a C core only consumer part (only servers have gotten them).
Wouldn't that be the point of focusing on the interoperability layers and recent investment in Arch?
Yeah exactly. So you need to invest into finding the fixes to that. Which is what Valve appears to be doing? It might be a fishing expedition or just a virtue signal to the foss world, sure. But they did do the thing.
And yes on AMD. I did leave that window for myself to crawl out through. I think if the trip down ARM on Arch ends up being a fishing expedition, they flip over to a known quantity for a refresh.
their investments is into a later for x64 to arm cpu translations, but still does not settle the problem that the gpus on arm based systems still have soo little development into games, which would then limit your options to amd, intel and nvidia based arm designs if you wanted an SOC with existing GPU support already in the environment. the moment you choose to have a tiled approach of mixing cpu and gpu from companies, you sort of instantly throw away the efficiency gains from switching to arm in the first place.
AMD and intel basically havent pushed out an atm based device yet, and Nvidia notoriously hates doing semi custom designs for clients.
personally i think youre far more likely to see the arm compatibility layer for basic pcvr games on a theoretical index 2 before a steam deck uses arm.