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If one were to actually build and design a SoC, ARM $60 game “console” that plugs into your TV in 2026 and sell it at a decent volume, what would the equivalent game console be potential-wise?

I’ve been doing 3D game development for retro consoles for fun and it’s actually quite impressive what you can actually achieve with little hardware.

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The Switch is essentially that. Obviously not $60 but it's a several generations old Nvidia Tegra SoC. The AppleTV wasn't far off either before its massive price hikes.

Not $60, but a bit close. I'd do something based on the RK3588 SoC. It's pretty beefy. GPU isn't stellar but it does have good video codec, a proper PCIe bus including support for e.g. m.2 slot nVME on many boards, and decent amounts of RAM, and good a multicore basis.

And there's some amount of kernel upstreaming that makes it a bit friendlier than some.

I couldn’t find a board under $120, but this would be a compelling target performance wise, even with 4GB shared memory

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