Given many new handhelds coming on the scene and general disinterest of Microsoft to support the market, do you think SteamOS will take place of default OS the same way Android did on phones some time ago?

  • TheYang@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    With Apple’s M-processors reigning supreme in the laptop space with insane values for performance-to-powerdraw (and in turn heat radiation and cooling requirements) the days of x86-by-default laptops are probably numbered and more manufacturers may want to switch to ARM, to avoid unfavorable comparisons to MacBooks.

    I think this is a misconception.
    M-processors are not amazing because they are ARM, or because they are Apple.
    They are pretty much where everyone else is al well, just one node shrink ahead, because Apple is the first in Line, because they can pay for it.

    for example, Apple M1 GPU vs Steam Deck GPU, Apple has a ~60% lead (in performance measured in TFLOPs fp32), but they are TSMC N5, whereas the Steam Deck GPU is built on the N7 node, (and there was the N6 node in between those two!)
    The A12 is Apples N7 SoC, and draws up to ~6W, and the GPU has roughly 1/3rd of AMD Steam Deck compute, pretty in line with power draw.
    Watt for Watt, Node for Node pure performance seems just good to me, not really surpassing anything else by a lot.

    • shinjiikarus@mylem.eu
      1·
      1 year ago

      I partially agree for the GPU-side of things. But while there have been iPads without active cooling for over a decade now, there has never been a competitive, high performance laptop like the current MacBook Air build on x86. I know you are right theoretically and maybe it is a solvable challenge and the priorities were just different, but whatever ARM does, it seems to run cooler than x86. Even if it is only bigLITTLE or some other shortcut.