Huh, I had not connected those (hypothetical) dots, but I could see it..
Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86 one with AMD's next-gen APU...
Yeah, there's a real gap in the market for a relatively compact handheld which can play low-spec PC games. The AMD-based handheld PCs available today are all pretty chunky.
You're right, I was mistaken, I've seen some Youtubers playing games on it, but they use GameHub to run Steam games, somehow I thought it was running Steam OS.
There's plenty of "relatively compact" ARM-based handhelds targeting the retro market already, but many of them are shipping with a pitiful amount of RAM (1GB or so) making them an absolute non-starter, while others (selling for significantly higher prices) run crappy Android-based OS's that will never be updated. There is a gap in the market for a good-quality retro-like handheld shipping with a Linux-native OS (or even just enabling one to be installed trivially after-the-fact, with everything working and no reliance on downstream hacked-together support packages).
There are handhelds for less than 200$ with very good screens and controls that can play all of these. Not to mention stream (via Steam or other software) from your PC!
If they did an AMD CPU using the same TSMC node that Apple uses for Arm CPUs it wouldn't be that much less power efficient and have much great compatibility.
They would realistically gain the most efficiency by getting Nvidia to design a modern super power efficient GPU like what was used in the original switch and Nvidia Shield. AMD GPUs can be great for desktop gaming but in terms of power efficiency to performance ratio Nvidia is way ahead
An AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU might be a hard thing to actually negotiate however given that AMD is big in the GPU space as well. As far as I know most "APU" aren't really that special and just a combo of GPU and CPU
APUs have the GPU and CPU on the same package, or sometimes even the same die (with tiling). If there was to be an Nvidia GPU and AMD CPU type system, they would have to be separate packages.
> Apple demonstrated to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.
Kinda. Apple silicon sips power when it isn't being used, but under a heavy gaming load it's pretty comparable to AMD. People report 2 hours of battery life playing cyberpunk on Macs, which matches the steam deck. It's only in lighter games where Apple pulls ahead significantly, and that really has nothing to do with it being ARM.
Sure, but Apple isn't selling their silicon to anyone else and Valve, successful as they are, don't have Apples money and economy-of-scale to throw at designing their own state-of-the-art CPU/GPU cores and building them on TSMCs state-of-the-art processes. Valve will have to roll with whatever is available on the open market, and if that happens to suck compared to Apples stuff then tough shit.
I'm definitely dreaming but I think it could be a win-win situation if Apple decided to licence its chips to Valve: the resulting handheld and VR headsets would be power/efficiency monsters and PC devs would finally have a good reason to target ARM, which could finally bring native PC gaming to MACs.
This doesn't feel like anything Apple has done in modern times. The last thing I remember them licensing was the iPod+HP from 2004-2005. Apple barely does enterprise support; they're very focused on selling their products to consumers and I don't think they're at all interested in selling CPUs to others.
Apple waffles and sometimes talks about gaming on Macs, but they lack the commitment that is needed. A lot of people like to buy a game and continue playing it for years, even after the developer went on to something else; or to buy years old games on sale. But you can't expect to run a mac os app compiled three to five years ago that is media and gpu heavy intensive on today's mac os. There will have been mandatory developer updates and it won't work.
Win32 is the only stable desktop ABI... and games need a stable ABI.
The Nintendo Switch already provides >160 million reasons for gamedevs to care about native ARM support, but that hasn't moved the needle for the Mac. Being ARM-based is the least of its problems, the problem is that it's a relatively tiny potential market owned by a company which is actively hostile to the needs of game developers.
The switch is underpowered to the point that most A(AA) games cannot run on it without a ton of effort and compromise, an M chip powered device would be a different story. But anyway it's never going to happen, just daydreaming about a perfect gaming setup...
Valve isn't in the position to make their own best-in-class ARM chips like Apple is. They'd have to find a vendor which can sell them the chip they need.
Which SoC on the market do you think fits the bill?
Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86 one with AMD's next-gen APU...