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).

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.

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.

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.

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?