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Comment by rpmisms | Hacker News Reader

It's incredibly obvious that they're trying to make Steam Deck 2 ARM-based. That's the generational change Valve is waiting for.

This is gonna be fantastic.

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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).

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.

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?

You can’t buy an M3 chip on its own

Why can’t someone else make one?

Because it’s a proprietary design? You’d have to reverse-engineer the whole chip, which is really hard to do on that process node

Giving them some credit, I think they're asking "why isn't there a close competitor" and that takes a much more involved answer.

That’s very much the trick. Apple is actually exceptionally good at making CPUs. Look at these single-thread benchmarks: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/ Similarly, if you look for the M4 in this list and then look for other ARM chips, you’ll have to look quite a ways down the list: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/mobile

It’s baffling to me that no one else (Qualcomm) has not been able to come close.

My guess is that CPU design is existential for Apple, and no one else cares enough to be dedicated enough to do what Apple has done.

This is exactly what happens when you invest billions and hire the best industry specialists for decades. M-series processors did not magically appear out of nowhere. Apple perfected them for years in iPhones, but people didn't have the ability to compare since Apple doesn't share their processors with anyone.

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.

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.

Apple still leads in raw performance. Their M5 is far ahead of basically everything in single-core performance. AFAIK it's because their architecture prioritizes IPC over frequency, and they can spend the entire silicon budget on a very large monolithic chip.

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

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.

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.

But even the most powerful apple silicon GPU is terrible compared to an average Nvidia chip

While I agree with the general point, this statement is factually incorrect - apple's most powerful laptop GPU punches right about the same as the laptop SKU of the RTX 4070, and the desktop Ultra variant punches up with a 5070ti. I'd say on both fronts that is well above the average.

And it will consume almost as much power as the Nvidia GPU to do so.

There is no world where Apple silicone is competing with a 5070ti on modern workloads. Not the hardware and certainly not the software where Nvidia DLSS is in it's own air with AMD just barely having gotten AI upscaling out and started approximating ray reconstruction.

Apple's MetalFX upscaler is pretty similar to DLSS (and I think well ahead of AMD's efforts on this front).

Ray tracing outside of Nvidia is a disaster all round, so yeah, nobody is competing on that front.

Ray tracing support on the newest AMD chips is getting good enough. They are still behind Nvidia but definitely not a disaster anymore

Certainly, nobody would buy an Apple hoping to run triple-A PC games.

But among people running LLMs outside of the data centre, Apple's unified memory together with a good-enough GPU has attracted quite a bit of attention. If you've got the cash, you can get a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. So there's one workload where apple silicon gives nvidia a run for their money.

Only in the size of model it can run, not speed of token generation.

Are there real world game benchmarks for this or are these synthetic tests?

Only a few, because it's not easy to find contemporary AAA games with native macOS ports. Notebookcheck has some comparisons for Assassins Creed: Shadows and Cyberpunk 2077[1]

[1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Cyberpunk-AC-Shadows-on-Apple-...

That simply isn't true. I have an RTX 4070 gaming PC and an M4 MacBook Pro w/ 36GB shared memory. When models fit in VRAM, the RTX 4070 still runs much faster. Maybe the next generation M5 chips are faster but they can't be 2-4x faster.

GP said laptop 4070. The laptop variants are typically much slower than the desktop variants of the same name.

It's not just power budget, the desktop part has more of everything, and in this case the 4070 mobile vs desktop turns out to be a 30-40% difference[1] in games.

Now I don't have a mac so if you meant "2-5x" when you said "much faster" well thdn yea, that 40% difference isn't enough to overcome that.

[1]: https://nanoreview.net/en/gpu-compare/geforce-rtx-4070-mobil...

a 4.5k$ M4 Max barely competes with an entry-level laptop with a 4060 which will be around ~1K in FPS in cyberpunk given the same settings. For AI it's even worse - on NVidia hardware you're getting double-digit speeds for FPS for real-time inference of e.g. stable diffusion, whereas on the M2 Max I have you get at best 0.5 FPS

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

You can, but the immediate mode path is slower and uses significantly more power. Mobile GPUs are not good at modern desktop game workflows where significant portions of the frame are compute shaders. They're generally very memory bandwidth starved, and general compute sidesteps most of the optimizations the hardware has made to work around this.

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.

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

That should be feasible, no?

Linux support is in a terrible state for Nvidia chips. Not going to happen.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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

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.

Samsungs newer Exynos are somewhat like this, their GPUs are based on AMDs RNA2.

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

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.

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.

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).

Retroid Pocket 5 supports Android and Linux dual boot.

Well, apparently there's this project I learned about literally yesterday! https://portmaster.games/games.html

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!

AYN Thor looks quite promising in that category https://www.ayntec.com/products/ayn-thor

It’s an ARM machine running SteamOS.

Your link says it runs Android?

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.

Sorry for the confusion.

Like an IPad mini?

Why not just make a performant ARM device? Apple demonstrated to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.

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.

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...

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

Just my thinking, they'll release a "Steam Deck Mini" that's more in line with other current ARM based gaming handhelds like the Ayn Odin.

You already have one, it's your phone. Winlator can run x86 games, you only need to attach a controller grip.

I wouldn't go that far but they are clearly poised for that, should it be adventageous.

The Frame is essentially there already, with what should be the top mobile arm setup.

If an x86 chipset dropped that fit their needs better, I don't think Valve would hesitate. I think it's just a matter of Valve trying to enable the best options down the road, whatever they may be.

Maybe, but I think it's more about the millions of ARM devices already deployed: android phones

speculating that it might be one of those arm + gpu SoC that gpu makers are currently developing, probably the amd one.

outside of gaming, i hope this work for qualcomm chips help those who bought laptops with their chips somehow. (i understand it is not the same stack but in theory)

That would make no sense, translation would use more power than the architecture difference

I have seen no signs there are any real GPU alternatives for ARM

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