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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 S
by l11r 10mo ago
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).
- MBCook 10mo agoI 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.
- RandallBrown 10mo agoDo 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?
- richardwhiuk 10mo agoYou can’t buy an M3 chip on its own
- madeofpalk 10mo agoWhy can’t someone else make one?
- sitharus 10mo agoBecause it’s a proprietary design? You’d have to reverse-engineer the whole chip, which is really hard to do on that process node
- jayd16 10mo agoGiving them some credit, I think they're asking "why isn't there a close competitor" and that takes a much more involved answer.
- tonyarkles 10mo agoThat’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/ 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 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/mobile
- madeofpalk 10mo agoIt’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.
- l11r 10mo agoThis 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.
- makeitdouble 10mo agoApple 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.
- StopDisinfo910 10mo agoYou 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.
- l11r 10mo agoApple 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.
- 15155 10mo agoBitmain is quite often first on new nodes, ahead of Apple, even.
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- MindSpunk 10mo agoTaking 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.
- zozbot234 10mo agoIsn'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.
- jcelerier 10mo agoBut even the most powerful apple silicon GPU is terrible compared to an average Nvidia chip
- swiftcoder 10mo agoWhile 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.
- Rohansi 10mo agoAnd it will consume almost as much power as the Nvidia GPU to do so.
- Rapzid 10mo agoThere 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.
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- p1necone 10mo agoCurrent 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.
- Rohansi 10mo agoYes, 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.
- StopDisinfo910 10mo ago> 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.
- lonjil 10mo ago> 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?
- teaearlgraycold 10mo agoWhy couldn’t they have an AMD GPU and an ARM CPU?
- jayd16 10mo agoDoes 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.
- someNameIG 10mo agoSamsungs newer Exynos are somewhat like this, their GPUs are based on AMDs RNA2.
- Rohansi 10mo agoWhat would that do? Power consumption would mainly come from the GPU because these devices are for gaming.
- stubish 10mo agoThe 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.