My personal opinion is that the frame is a bit of a Trojan horse for widening the hardware they can run games (via Steam) on. With folks playing more and more indie and lower power requirement games, the rise of retroid pockets and Android gaming in general has taken off, and initiatives like gamehub lite have made it possible to run even Skyrim on these low power handhelds.
On the same token, the amount of performance per watt that Apple has been able to get out of custom arm based silicon is astounding. Valve has said they wouldn’t release another steam deck unless it represented a generational leap. That sort of leap would be something like the intel —> m1 that Apple produced.
What’s most exciting for me, is better steam support on multiple architectures. I think what’s most exciting for Valve, is their software and storefront running on more devices and providing a better experience than ever before. From VR to the deck to the desktop to the living room, I think their strategy at this point is pretty clear.
It’s only logical that they’re gonna do it eventually. Probably not with the next generation though.
The only reason we’re still using x86 is because of app support. If FEX lives up to its expectations and machines that use it gain traction (thus taking a bigger market share), developers will notice and hopefully start compiling their games to run on Linux on ARM natively with insane performance gains, at least on power to watt ratio at first, but raw performance later once better chips get made.
I think you’re overestimating how soon we’ll see the next generation.
If you’ve used something like GameNative you know the vast majority of the library works already, today.
I’m guessing we get a similar gap between the deck one and 2 (assuming it ever comes put) as between the index and frame at minimum.