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.
A Steam Deck 2, unlikely. AMD and Intel x86 chips are competitive with ARM chips in that 10-15w range. Battery life is great in laptops. They’re competitive with Apple at the same power ranges. There’s going to be performance overhead translating x86 to ARM along with compatibility issues as FEX is maturing. Deck 2 should be targeting as much performance in the up to 15w range as possible. CPU instruction translator goes against that
Deck 2 makes most sense to stick with AMD. AMD CPU+GPU. There’s no real cost savings getting AMD to integrate in an ARM chip. Qualcomm GPU’s have far worse drivers than AMD and unproven to be as hardware feature performance as AMD/Nvidia. Intel still sucks power with their Arc cards compared to AMD/Nvidia at the same performance range. Nvidia ARM+GPU I doubt provides any cost savings. PowerVR and Mali graphics have trash drivers and probably not feature competitive with AMD/Nvidia for PC expectations
Steam Deck lite down the line sure where an ARM Deck that is stronger than the AMD deck and cheaper/lighter/fanless or maintains the low price of the old deck because inflation. But that should be down the line for FEX to mature and be certain that the ARM hardware is strong enough to make the translation overhead a moot point for something that’s supposed to match a gen 1 Deck
Maybe Windows and Linux consumer ARM really takes off and we start seeing games ship ARM binaries. Then eventually it’ll make sense for the high end handheld to go ARM. FEX mature for the older games that never updated with an ARM binary
I don’t think it’s actually true that in low spec ranges AMD and Intel are competitive. The Apple a19 pro chip has a tdp of 8w while a Z1 extreme from amd has a 15w envelop that goes up to 30w. The A19 crushes the Z1 in single core and is 90idh percent on multi core. The fp32 performance is double the z1 as some indication of gpu horsepower. So let’s just say near the same performance at less than half the tdp. Or another way, same steam deck performance you’ve had (well better actually, steam deck doesn’t have a z1 extreme) at twice the battery life. The A19 Pro is also in a passively cooled device where a Z1 Extreme is actively cooled. Data sources for this: just looking at geekbench and pass mark scores that I could find. Of course there’s instruction translation overhead, and it’s not as clear cut as this (for one, Valve is not likely to poach chip designers from Apple and they seem reticent to create their own hardware), but still a thought worth considering.
Ultimately I don’t care if it’s arm based, I care about the performance of the machine itself (in totality, which the steam deck excels at even still).
So I guess in a long winded way, I’m agreeing with you that they should maximize the performance up to 15w (I would have said 30w for docked access but the steam machine seems to be their goal for the living room). I guess I am just not super convinced legacy chipmakers have what it takes to be competitive, even with a FEX penalty. I think we won’t see a steam deck 2 for another 2 years, and that’s a long time for FEX to mature, drivers to mature, and Valve to line up a low power, extremely strong device.