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.
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I’ve been wondering this too since the announcement of the frame. The ARM compatibility layer was the most exciting bit of the presentation for me. As much as I love my Deck I most certainly won’t be getting a Deck 2 in the future because what I need more in order to truly enjoy handheld gaming, for these aging eyes of mine, is a larger screen, something like 11+ inches. And it’s clear to me that those sizes can’t be achieved in the form factor of a Deck, you need something like a thick tablet with detachable controllers to do so.
I think the huge success of the Deck is because the form factor and the ability to play AAA PC games in said form factor, even if is on low settings or 30FPS. From the research I’ve done while buying a tablet for both content consumption and gaming is clear to me that ARM is still not up to that task yet but it is close enough. Next year’s Snapdragon elite 2 is tipped to be 30-404% faster and with a good compatibility layer and better drivers it could be a very viable option for handheld gaming.
I think that is not a matter of choice between x86 or ARM. Valve partnership with AMD goes deep and I think they will continue using both platforms for the foreseeable future and even possible but unlikely that at some point we got a base Deck with ARM and a pro model with x86.
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.
We’ve discussed ARM hardware for a future deck a few times here, ever since we learned that valve was working on an ARM compatibility layer.
It seems obvious for a handheld since ARM devices are usually much more battery friendly than x86 devices, but I’ve been told that we won’t see any actual hardware advantages from x86 games running through the compatibility layer. Games that have a native ARM version will perform better, but the FEX layer is just about ensuring backwards compatibility and won’t actually unlock any hardware improvements for pre-existing x86 games.
Agreed there. The only advantage is if you have more performant silicon for a given power envelope that exceeds the compatibility overhead of running through FEX. This is why in early days, Rosetta occasionally did just as well on M1 Mac’s as the Intel based software, with the leap in performance more than overcoming that translation layer impact.
They didn’t really have a choice for the Frame, due to the inside-out tracking features requiring image processing stuff most easily available in those Qualcomm chips. But sure, in a few years when there might be a Steam Deck successor, they will probably weight their options also based on how well FEX did on the Frame. The chances will be probably higher if some 3rd party developers port SteamOS to some currently Android based handhelds.
Doubt it. All the news has said “semi-custom” chip like the steam deck did when it came out. Valve has tweaked an existing x64 CPU again.
Not to say it’s impossible, since AMD does have an arm license, but not likely
This is true. But I’m more looking at the work they’re putting in on the Frame as a bellwether. It seems odd they’d support a tiny platform for them with an ARM cpu (that matches typical Android phone hardware). It’s possible they just want to increase the compatibility layers in that space in a general sense.
I guess I’m looking at the M5 chip 2x’ing the performance (single core) vs the M1 variant from 5 years ago almost exactly, and over that same frame the best desktop cpus have seen a 1.5x’ing. A mobile chip does better single core than desktop chips from AMD and Intel (caveats here). The perf per watt is absurd.
To be clear, I don’t think this will happen quickly. I expect another 2 years before the next steam deck arrives. I just think it’s interesting that valve is supporting a non x64/x86 architecture in a product category here and have a hard time believing it’s a total dead end for them.
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.Probably not with the next generation though.
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.
Unlikely that they would produce their own chips but very likely they use something similar to X1 Elite, I think.
