I think you need to take a step back and ask if ARM makes sense if you’re translating x86 instructions 100% of the time. Unless you’re hoping people will develop new games for ARM and you won’t use your SD to play existing titles much, but that seems like a 180° shift to me.

It doesn’t always scale down though. There’s always an efficiency curve so we really can’t speculate. I agree, we have to wait and see.

I wouldn’t count AMD out. The whole reason the Steam Deck is so successful is because of AMDs Mobile GPU, not necessarily it’s CPU. AMD has been able to make some very efficient GPUs lately, so I do belive with a couple new architectures and die shrinks we will get the generational leap they’re talking about.

ARM sounds nice, and it might one day be, but getting x86 translation working flawlessly WITHOUT performance/battery costs at the same time as proton is just asking a heck of a lot.

ARM does best when it’s doing ARM things. Since all games are built for x86 with nobody having any intention of compiling for native ARM, I don’t really see the point. The whole reason i like the Steam Deck is to play older back catalog games, and those are all x86. Apple pulls it off because they only translate x86 when they have to.

Yes. There are a couple different ways to do that.