The exact quote:
It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.
Presumably this will mean a high-performance ARM CPU (comparable to the Apple M series), along with the dynamic recompilation technology Steam have been experimenting with. (It’s unlikely that Intel or AMD will deliver the generational leap they’re talking about.)
This reminds me of an old thread on a random forum. Just when Sims 2 was released they were speculating what Sims 3 would look like.
Someone suggested that the next game will surely be in the source engine!
While your point is more realistic than that I still don’t think valve could pull this off in reasonable time. Translation for games is extremely hard to do right. I think if at all there will be another generation of decks before we see something like this.
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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.
Dynamic recompilation technology?
It’s “FEX”, Valve have apparently been testing it with Proton.
The Asahi Linux team have their own packaging/tooling around it, but theirs is slower at runtime because they have to run the games inside a VM as well.
Their stack is so brutal. It’s incredible how they overcame it all.
ARM instruction set, wrong page size, GPU without documentation for which they reverse engineered a Vulkan and OpenGL driver.
They’ve done some amazing work.
I think we’ll get at least one more x86 Steam Deck generation before it moves to ARM (if it moves to ARM at all).
The Snapdragon X isn’t anything to write home about when it comes to efficiency under load, with the newest CPUs (with iGPUs) from AMD and Intel keeping up or maybe even exceeding it.