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.
Doubtful. Emulation of x86 code is just too slow. I’d rather expect hybrid SoC, with both ARM cores and x86. System and dedicated games can run natively on ARM, while legacy software may utilize x86
I don’t know - you’d need at least 4 arm cores, and 4 x86. Current deck uses just 4 x86, so squeezing in more would require waiting for some fabrication improvement to keep power draw and cost sane
Not necessarily. Steam Deck SoC is CPU+GPU out of which latter is probably the bigger part. Also, on the chip there are all the memory, USB, Pcie, audio and other controllers.
Adding 4 arm cores definetly wouldn’t double the chip size
That the kernel developers to decide, the deve wouldn’t need to change angthingz but i doubt the idea too, how can sincronize the arm and x86? How to you handle libraries of the different architectures
The libraries would probably be easy. We’ve already got x86 and amd64 libraries on the same machine, but the kernel I imagine would be awful. Would two kernels have to run on the same machine? What about memory access? What about the scheduler? Would it really be more efficient than emulation? For every x86 instruction, there is either an equivalent instruction or a set of equivalent instructions for ARM.
Doubtful. Emulation of x86 code is just too slow. I’d rather expect hybrid SoC, with both ARM cores and x86. System and dedicated games can run natively on ARM, while legacy software may utilize x86
This seems like it would put the price far out of reach.
I don’t know - you’d need at least 4 arm cores, and 4 x86. Current deck uses just 4 x86, so squeezing in more would require waiting for some fabrication improvement to keep power draw and cost sane
That just seems like at least double the cost.
Not necessarily. Steam Deck SoC is CPU+GPU out of which latter is probably the bigger part. Also, on the chip there are all the memory, USB, Pcie, audio and other controllers.
Adding 4 arm cores definetly wouldn’t double the chip size
That sounds like a nightmare to code for.
That the kernel developers to decide, the deve wouldn’t need to change angthingz but i doubt the idea too, how can sincronize the arm and x86? How to you handle libraries of the different architectures
The libraries would probably be easy. We’ve already got x86 and amd64 libraries on the same machine, but the kernel I imagine would be awful. Would two kernels have to run on the same machine? What about memory access? What about the scheduler? Would it really be more efficient than emulation? For every x86 instruction, there is either an equivalent instruction or a set of equivalent instructions for ARM.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik, applications talk through APIs. It shouldn’t matter if app runs x86 and kernel is ARM
But the code that loads other code (launches an app, switches to it, etc) needs to be running on the same CPU, afaik.