It's incredibly obvious that they're trying to make Steam Deck 2 ARM-based. That's the generational change Valve is waiting for.

This is gonna be fantastic.

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l11r 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are no ARM chips with enough power. They have said many times that they are not interested in minor performance improvements but rather want a leap. The Snapdragon X2 Elite chip is the leader (I cannot count Apple; they won't share their chips, obviously), but it doesn't even match AMD with their RDNA 3.5, and who knows when they will (or even if).

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MindSpunk 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Taking games designed for desktop GPUs and running them on mobile GPUs with tile-based-deferred-rendering hardware will be a disaster. Mobile GPU designs will choke on modern games as they're designed around hardware features that mobile GPUs either don't have, or that run very slowly.

Peak theoretical throughput for the GPUs you find in ARM SoCs is quite good compared to the power draw, but you will not get peak throughput for workloads designed for Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

	▲	zozbot234 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Isn't the GPU on Apple Silicon machines a tile-based "mobile" GPU design? Many of the hardware features that traditional GPU's have and mobile GPU's lack can be easily "faked" with GPU-side general compute.

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MBCook 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree they won’t do a Steam Deck 2 that’s ARM. Maybe in the future?

BUT, what about a “Steam Deck Mini”? Something at/above the current Steam Deck, maybe a little closer to Switch 2, but smaller/thinner/maybe a little cheaper?

Yeah you’re not going to run Cyberpunk 2087: Johnny’s Rent Is Due. But older games, less demanding indie games, and many emulators would still work great. Plus remote play of your big desktop if you have one.

I’m not saying they will, but I could see it as a possibility.

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makeitdouble 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple not sharing their chips extends to Apple keeping their grip on the higher density nodes.

I wonder if it's still the case, but for a while Apple was buying the totality of TSMC's capacity for 3nm nodes, leaving the rest of the world with only 4nm+ chips to grab.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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RandallBrown 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you mean there's no ARM chips that they can buy? Surely the ARM chips in Apple's devices are powerful enough aren't they?

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richardwhiuk 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You can’t buy an M3 chip on its own

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madeofpalk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why can’t someone else make one?

	▲	sitharus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Because it’s a proprietary design? You’d have to reverse-engineer the whole chip, which is really hard to do on that process node

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jayd16 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wouldn't go that far but they are clearly poised for that, should it be adventageous.

The Frame is essentially there already, with what should be the top mobile arm setup.

If an x86 chipset dropped that fit their needs better, I don't think Valve would hesitate. I think it's just a matter of Valve trying to enable the best options down the road, whatever they may be.

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sbarre 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Huh, I had not connected those (hypothetical) dots, but I could see it..

Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86 one with AMD's next-gen APU...

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jsheard 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, there's a real gap in the market for a relatively compact handheld which can play low-spec PC games. The AMD-based handheld PCs available today are all pretty chunky.

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zozbot234 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's plenty of "relatively compact" ARM-based handhelds targeting the retro market already, but many of them are shipping with a pitiful amount of RAM (1GB or so) making them an absolute non-starter, while others (selling for significantly higher prices) run crappy Android-based OS's that will never be updated. There is a gap in the market for a good-quality retro-like handheld shipping with a Linux-native OS (or even just enabling one to be installed trivially after-the-fact, with everything working and no reliance on downstream hacked-together support packages).

	▲	andrepd 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Retroid Pocket 5 supports Android and Linux dual boot.

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andrepd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, apparently there's this project I learned about literally yesterday! https://portmaster.games/games.html

There are handhelds for less than 200$ with very good screens and controls that can play all of these. Not to mention stream (via Steam or other software) from your PC!

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jonny_eh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just my thinking, they'll release a "Steam Deck Mini" that's more in line with other current ARM based gaming handhelds like the Ayn Odin.

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Melatonic 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If they did an AMD CPU using the same TSMC node that Apple uses for Arm CPUs it wouldn't be that much less power efficient and have much great compatibility.

They would realistically gain the most efficiency by getting Nvidia to design a modern super power efficient GPU like what was used in the original switch and Nvidia Shield. AMD GPUs can be great for desktop gaming but in terms of power efficiency to performance ratio Nvidia is way ahead

An AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU might be a hard thing to actually negotiate however given that AMD is big in the GPU space as well. As far as I know most "APU" aren't really that special and just a combo of GPU and CPU

	▲	hurricanepootis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		APUs have the GPU and CPU on the same package, or sometimes even the same die (with tiling). If there was to be an Nvidia GPU and AMD CPU type system, they would have to be separate packages.

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Spivak 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why not just make a performant ARM device? Apple demonstrated to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.

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jsheard 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but Apple isn't selling their silicon to anyone else and Valve, successful as they are, don't have Apples money and economy-of-scale to throw at designing their own state-of-the-art CPU/GPU cores and building them on TSMCs state-of-the-art processes. Valve will have to roll with whatever is available on the open market, and if that happens to suck compared to Apples stuff then tough shit.

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Guillaume86 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm definitely dreaming but I think it could be a win-win situation if Apple decided to licence its chips to Valve: the resulting handheld and VR headsets would be power/efficiency monsters and PC devs would finally have a good reason to target ARM, which could finally bring native PC gaming to MACs.

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jsheard 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The Nintendo Switch already provides >160 million reasons for gamedevs to care about native ARM support, but that hasn't moved the needle for the Mac. Being ARM-based is the least of its problems, the problem is that it's a relatively tiny potential market owned by a company which is actively hostile to the needs of game developers.

	▲	Guillaume86 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The switch is underpowered to the point that most A(AA) games cannot run on it without a ton of effort and compromise, an M chip powered device would be a different story. But anyway it's never going to happen, just daydreaming about a perfect gaming setup...