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Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games, sparking speculations about future hardware
(www.notebookcheck.net)
I'm dripping wet
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Risc-v steamdeck makes me salivate....
Where are you getting RISC from?
Seriously. You can't even get loose risc-v chips even from mouser and especially not ebay or alibaba. I'm not counting those bullshit low pin coint microcontrollers, I want an actual microprocessor with a parallel bus and peripherals so I can do personal computing stuff with it. And is at least more powerful than a Pentium 1.
With arm cpus you can at least get the bottom of the barrel microprocessors no one else wants. A53 1.4ghz chips are actually reasonably priced but beyond that it's not. Arm is currently a better contender for a "build your own computer" type thing.
But they said ARM.
In my opinion this would be a bad move, the steam deck has an iffy enough game library and emulation is notoriously more difficult on architectures they weren’t designed for, considering the steam deck has too emulate %99.999… of its library that would be bad.
An iffy game library? It runs almost everything that isn't an online game with certain anti cheats. It's pretty not iffy at all.
My Steam Deck plays a lot of games, more than I even expected it to. Honestly I'm not sure where this "iffy library" crap comes from.
Can you provide examples of this?
I realize anecdotes aren't data, but my older LCD deck good with everything up the PS3 and the Nintendo Switch, everything beyond that I could obtain directly from the Steam Store.
The steam deck runs Linux and has to use a modified version of WINE(Wine Is Not an Emulator, that’s the downvotes I assume) but almost all games are made exclusively for windows, the games you can play on the steam deck are all running through a translation layer, now steam handles this well and they make it almost seamless but that doesn’t change the fact that you get some Jank and incompatible games, AntiCheat is the big one that comes to mind but hardly everything, I know it has troubles with Dx9 and earlier Dx, I have trouble with the Arkham Knight games, Gta 5 just borked the update, Vr isn’t playable,
Emulate?
It redirects API calls technically not that that changes much since that is essentially all emulation does on the same architecture but if ever they switch to arm it will be full on no asterisks emulation, yeah I was a little sloppy with my language but same difference.
Since they seem so interested in Linux, open source, and boosting currently niche technologies to mainstream, maybe they should make the Steam Deck RISC-V?
Valve is interested in controlling the software they use on their hardware and not being dependent on Microsoft or license costs. They are a for profit business. More games running on their machines help their sales.
RISC-V would be a terrible architecture for them at the moment. There are zero chips available with somewhat competitive performance. The number of commercial games that natively run on it is also small if not zero.
I think the open source angle is slightly incidental: They saw Apple's and Microsoft app stores as a threat and decided using linux as the OS for their devices. That's at least what I've read a long time ago.
Going by Apple’s transition from Intel to ARM, an ARM-based Steam Deck would be a no-brainer. They could make it a lot less bulky, ditch the cooling fans and still bump up performance.
It’s not a no brainer. If they want to run x68-64 games on it, they need good tools like Apple’s Rosetta. It would definitely decrease performance and lower the number of compatible games.
Hopefully they start supporting ARM64 on platforms that made the switch already too.
Unfortunately I get a feeling that Valve is going to make a proprietary platform out of Linux like Google did with Android and people will be clapping all along the way.
Valve will do with SteamOS what’s good for them and their profits. They aren’t in this for idealism.
They stand to gain nothing from making a proprietary platform
Whether we like it or not, the low-power-draw of ARM mean it's probably the future of personal computing, very likely to supplant X64 systems in all but the server space. If ARM continues on this path of growth to create even faster, more agile processors, it could also eventually take over the server space well.
Honestly, it's time for a shakeup to Intel's dominance and the stagnating status of X86/X64 chips.
EDIT: Come to think of it, in the future an ARM-powered Steamdeck might not need to be as bulky at all for the same output. Ideal for the form-factor.
Once a truly reliable x86 translation layer is figured out Intel's days are numbered, my mate just got a Surface pro ARM and the PRISM emulator mostly works, but it has all sorts of trouble with anything that hooks deep into Windows like VPNs and Anticheat software. The battery literally lasts all day though, sometimes more even with heavy usage which is kind of amazing.
There are ARM servers available too.
riscv is the future.
ARM64 is already here (Apple have replaced Intel with it, and Windows PC vendors are following suit), it’s just, as William Gibson put it, not evenly distributed. Mainstream high-performance ARM devices are imminent in a way that RISC-V isn’t yet.
I like the sound of this for a device, but couldn’t it be more for these new ARM laptops?
Who knows, maybe we'll see something like a Steam Engine processor by 2030, hah!