Valve still waiting on a 'generational leap' for Steam Deck 2 - but it's coming
Valve still waiting on a 'generational leap' for Steam Deck 2 - but it's coming
Valve gave us the strongest wording yet that a Steam Deck 2 is actually real, although it's still clearly going to be some time away before there's enough of an upgrade.
Even the different problems between the LCD and OLED models make me content for valve to take it slow.
Don't diminish the support with multiple sku's, work on fixing the small but persistent problems with the current operating system, let other companies keep the hardware manufacturers pushing forward, continue making sure the operating system works well on the more modern hardware, and release a single product when the time is right.
There should be no decimal after the deck 2, keep the product focused, don't divide your labor and multiply your potential bugs.
Also please have your operating system developers try using the deck interface for things besides gaming, trading, forum posting and even browsing the store is hampered by easily replicable bugs.
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?
it does not remotely get the same kind of battery life as it does in OSX
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.
I wouldn't sound so sure. There are a lot of blockers to getting a working ARM based steam deck. First Arch Linux (which steam os is based on) does not offer official ARM binaries. This would mean they would need a new base os or work on getting Arch Linux to support ARM. With their recent donations to Arch Linux were focused on unblocking some issues with supporting Arch on ARM (notibally stuff needed for better automated builds) would suggest they want to stick with Arch.
Next you need good emulation layers for x64 and x86 as that is what all games are written in. Which there are leaks that say they are working on this as well.
But that is two big blockers that could take years to solve. So all comes down to when they want to release the next deck. Within a couple of years and I don't think it will be arm based. After that the chances go up quite a bit.
With their recent donations to Arch Linux were focused on unblocking some issues with supporting Arch on ARM (notibally stuff needed for better automated builds) would suggest they want to stick with Arch.
Next you need good emulation layers for x64 and x86 as that is what all games are written in. Which there are leaks that say they are working on this as well.
Thats two legs of support for an ARM architecture.
But that is two big blockers that could take years to solve.
Sure. But what you are describing is "uncertainty". Uncertainty in isolation isn't a form of evidence. It could take years. It could not. Its not just Valve looking to solve this issue. MS has committed to ARM based interoperability; so has Apple. MS and Apple obviously want things to work seamlessly between ARM and x64, x86. The heat/ power to performance gains are just too much to leave on the table and both of those Software/ Hardware manufacturers saw this coming. If this was a project coming out of Valve & Arch doing the work; sure, I'd give it a time line of a couple to several years. But Valve while coming in with backing and there are other players looking to overcome and address the same problem. With teams like MS and Apple also working on it, I expect this to be figured out on a faster timeline. Months/ few years.
Within a couple of years and I don’t think it will be arm based.
Sure. If thats your bet thats your bet. My bet is solidly on ARM. Its what the evidence we have points at, even if there isn't a ton of certainty around it.
Its gonna be ARM based
Doubtful. Emulation of x86 code is just too slow. I'd rather expect hybrid SoC, with both ARM cores and x86. System and dedicated games can run natively on ARM, while legacy software may utilize x86
ARM isn't exactly efficient when used for performance-demanding things. It excels a low power efficiency, but as soon as you throw a persistent heavy process at it, it'll gulp down a battery all the same.
And x86 has been catching up on both sides. Standby times are only getting better.
If the hardware can ever be shrunk enough to make even a semi-pocketable x86 handheld, I would be happy if Valve were ever to release a "Steam Deck Mini" or something.
Or maybe their new efforts with ARM support point toward a future of a much more portable Steam-on-Linux-on-ARM device.