I’m thinking of getting a refurbished Steam Deck OLED and was gonna wait till after christmas but if they announce a successor soon the price might drop even further. But then again if I wait much longer I might as well get the new one. The struggle of being cheap lol.
I think the point of this article is the new ain’t coming any time soon. I think now is not a bad time to invest in a refurbished Steam Deck!
Do we think it’ll be ready when they can give it specs to match the steam machine so there’s a single target for developers, or the more exciting option of building something arm-based using whatever fex wizardry is going on in the frame?
My guess is, they want it to use ARM processors for better battery life. They might be using Frame as a kind of test platform for that, and when FEX is good enough, they can go ahead with Deck 2.
I doubt the same hw is an option, given roughly 150W TDP on cube…
The cube uses X64, the headset uses the arm chip. Even $500 arm CPUs can’t run intensive x64 games.
i think they mean more in terms of relative performance, so that “Steam Machine Verified” also means “Steam Deck 2 verified”. But I guess from a dev perspective, that is not exactly a “single target”, as diff hw means diff optimizations are required.
I would guess and kinda hope so? And then merge the steam machine/deck verified status together later in life?
Why this obsession with ARM?
Do you even what to be able to game on the thing? AMD cpus have come a long way with battery life. And Linux amd64 support is at this point at 20years, arm is at 5y if you’re lucky, usually 2-0y.
I’m not so concerned with the instruction set. The differences are generally overrated.
I’m concerned about monopoly power. Out of three companies that can legally make modern x86-64 processors, AMD is the only one worth talking about anymore. Unless China wants to throw some major weight into restarting VIA’s x86 line, that’s not likely to change. China seems fine with ARM and RISC-V, and ignoring x86.
The competition on the horizon is no longer AMD vs Intel. It’s AMD vs ARM vs RISC-V.
It’s not necessarily about ARM. Based on their statements, they’re looking for >75% performance increase at similar power levels and cost. That spec doesn’t exist today and going forward, ARM will probably have a better shot at meeting that spec than AMD (depending on continued development of FEX).
AMD has more power saving features on the roadmap than Qualcomm
That would be great to see and at a competitive price point.
If Apple licensed their optimised variant of ARM to third parties, Steam would probably jump right on it, along with other hardware manufacturers. The performance Apple Silicon got over the x86 machines it replaced was game-changing, along with the improved battery life. And other ARM vendors, whilst behind Apple (who do have excellent CPU engineers), are catching up.
Keep dreaming, and even if Apple magically licensed out I’m not sure it would be worthwhile.
Intel & AMD have been incredible at maintaining, supporting mainline Linux and keeping old hardware supported.
Apple on the other hand ends support at 7years maximum, no Linux support.
Qualcomm ends support at 5y with support being the bear minimum for Linux.
