[l11r]

There are no ARM chips with enough power. They have said many times that they are not interested in minor performance improvements but rather want a leap. The Snapdragon X2 Elite chip is the leader (I cannot count Apple; they won't share their chips, obviously), but it doesn't even match AMD with their RDNA 3.5, and who knows when they will (or even if).

[MindSpunk]

Taking games designed for desktop GPUs and running them on mobile GPUs with tile-based-deferred-rendering hardware will be a disaster. Mobile GPU designs will choke on modern games as they're designed around hardware features that mobile GPUs either don't have, or that run very slowly.

Peak theoretical throughput for the GPUs you find in ARM SoCs is quite good compared to the power draw, but you will not get peak throughput for workloads designed for Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

[zozbot234]

Isn't the GPU on Apple Silicon machines a tile-based "mobile" GPU design? Many of the hardware features that traditional GPU's have and mobile GPU's lack can be easily "faked" with GPU-side general compute.

[david-gpu]

Snapdragon doesn't do tile based deferred rendering the way Apple does (or did). Snapdragon does (or did) a form of tile-based rendering, but it is a completely different design, with completely different performance tradeoffs.

[jayd16]

What about the Switch 2 (nVidia's Tegra) line? The one in the Swich 2 is using Ampere architecture.

That should be feasible, no?

[koolala]

You don't have to use tile-based rendering on these chips anymore. They can directly draw to the entire screen.

[MBCook]

I agree they won’t do a Steam Deck 2 that’s ARM. Maybe in the future?

BUT, what about a “Steam Deck Mini”? Something at/above the current Steam Deck, maybe a little closer to Switch 2, but smaller/thinner/maybe a little cheaper?

Yeah you’re not going to run Cyberpunk 2087: Johnny’s Rent Is Due. But older games, less demanding indie games, and many emulators would still work great. Plus remote play of your big desktop if you have one.

I’m not saying they will, but I could see it as a possibility.

[makeitdouble]

Apple not sharing their chips extends to Apple keeping their grip on the higher density nodes.

I wonder if it's still the case, but for a while Apple was buying the totality of TSMC's capacity for 3nm nodes, leaving the rest of the world with only 4nm+ chips to grab.

[StopDisinfo910]

You don’t need to wonder. Top of the lines Snapdragon, Dimensity and Exinos SoC all use 3nm.

Amusingly, it’s the second time in two days I have this discussion here and I have noticed that a lot of people, who I think are American and using Apple phones by default, are completely unaware of what the mobile SoC landscape looks like nowadays. Apple lead doesn’t exist anymore as of this generation.

[15155]

Bitmain is quite often first on new nodes, ahead of Apple, even.

[p1necone]

Current gen ARM is pretty strong - for an example, the switch 2 runs on ARM and it's decently more powerful than the current steam deck.

[Rohansi]

Yes, the Nvidia GPU in the Switch 2 is more powerful. But not the ARM CPU.

The existence of Nvidia DLSS (upscaling and frame generation) alone is a huge advantage over the Steam Deck, too. The Deck can't use DLSS because it's Nvidia only, AMD FSR isn't as good, and the latest FSR isn't even supported (officially) on the SoC.

[stubish]

The bit about FEX is interesting. Taking x86 code and running it on ARM. The most important thing for Valve to do is pick what instruction set to use, one you can run natively or native hardware, or efficiently and reliably through translation on alien hardware. ARM might be a great choice, as hardware exists at scale on mobile devices, and emulated on other devices even if the CPU happens to be Intel or AMD. Valve is then in control, rather than Intel or Apple or Microsoft.

[teaearlgraycold]

Why couldn’t they have an AMD GPU and an ARM CPU?

[jayd16]

Does something like that exist on the AMD side?

You're basically describing nVidia's Tegra line. The latest is in the Switch 2 I believe.

[Rohansi]

What would that do? Power consumption would mainly come from the GPU because these devices are for gaming.

[StopDisinfo910]

> There are no ARM chips with enough power.

Disagree.

Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have mobile SoC which are more performant than the M2 and the X2 Elite is in the ballpark of Apple top SoC.

Considering how I currently use my Steam Deck, there is nothing my current phone couldn’t do. Sure, you won’t get PS5 performance but I’m personally completely happy with Switch 2 level performance.

[lonjil]

> Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have mobile SoC which are more performant than the M2 and the X2 Elite is in the ballpark of Apple top SoC.

At what power consumption? And is that both CPU and GPU, or just GPU?

[RandallBrown]

Do you mean there's no ARM chips that they can buy? Surely the ARM chips in Apple's devices are powerful enough aren't they?

[richardwhiuk]

You can’t buy an M3 chip on its own