Valve gave us the strongest wording yet that a Steam Deck 2 is actually real, although it's still clearly going to be some time away before there's enough of an upgrade.
With their recent donations to Arch Linux were focused on unblocking some issues with supporting Arch on ARM (notibally stuff needed for better automated builds) would suggest they want to stick with Arch.
Next you need good emulation layers for x64 and x86 as that is what all games are written in. Which there are leaks that say they are working on this as well.
Thats two legs of support for an ARM architecture.
But that is two big blockers that could take years to solve.
Sure. But what you are describing is “uncertainty”. Uncertainty in isolation isn’t a form of evidence. It could take years. It could not. Its not just Valve looking to solve this issue. MS has committed to ARM based interoperability; so has Apple. MS and Apple obviously want things to work seamlessly between ARM and x64, x86. The heat/ power to performance gains are just too much to leave on the table and both of those Software/ Hardware manufacturers saw this coming. If this was a project coming out of Valve & Arch doing the work; sure, I’d give it a time line of a couple to several years. But Valve while coming in with backing and there are other players looking to overcome and address the same problem. With teams like MS and Apple also working on it, I expect this to be figured out on a faster timeline. Months/ few years.
Within a couple of years and I don’t think it will be arm based.
Sure. If thats your bet thats your bet. My bet is solidly on ARM. Its what the evidence we have points at, even if there isn’t a ton of certainty around it.
Thats two legs of support for an ARM architecture.
Sure. But what you are describing is “uncertainty”. Uncertainty in isolation isn’t a form of evidence. It could take years. It could not. Its not just Valve looking to solve this issue. MS has committed to ARM based interoperability; so has Apple. MS and Apple obviously want things to work seamlessly between ARM and x64, x86. The heat/ power to performance gains are just too much to leave on the table and both of those Software/ Hardware manufacturers saw this coming. If this was a project coming out of Valve & Arch doing the work; sure, I’d give it a time line of a couple to several years. But Valve while coming in with backing and there are other players looking to overcome and address the same problem. With teams like MS and Apple also working on it, I expect this to be figured out on a faster timeline. Months/ few years.
Sure. If thats your bet thats your bet. My bet is solidly on ARM. Its what the evidence we have points at, even if there isn’t a ton of certainty around it.