Wanted to talk about this a bit. I’ve seen some things showing how well along translation layers have gotten with both proton from windows based games and x86 apps running on ARM. I think it’d be a huge improvement for something like standby time. Although I’m not sure how well it’d be for power efficiency while gaming since it might use the same amount of power for similar performance regardless. Maybe better for low complexity games like balatro or vampire survivors?
Hopefully they go straight into RISC-V!
Absolutely 0 chance as current RISC-V chips are dog slow and inefficient. Currently RISC-V is only really used in microcontrollers and everything else is highly experimental.
I’m of the opinion that Valve should keep the og steam deck around for 7 years to keep squeezing more value out of the hardware with software updates and to keep the baseline simple for developers to ease the transition to the linux and mobile technologies then release the next iteration of hardware in 2029, RISC-V would be much more developed at that point especially with Valve’s full backing.
RISC-V could be a lot better supported then. But I don’t think a lifetime this long would work for the Deck. 7 years is nearly as long as the Switch 1, but that device had the benefit of being a platform in itself with no alternative (as in there are no other switch-compatible-devices). This forces the devs to target it, no matter what performance or fidelity they might wish for.
The Steam Deck might feel a lot like a console, but in the end it is just a PC and the PC gaming world isn’t going to wait for Valves next device. The game-tech will just move on past the steam decks capabilities and a lot of gamers will leave it behind and move to other SteamOS (or windows) compatible hardware. The Deck would still have a lot of value as an indie gaming machine, though.