I really hope Valve try to push ARM in the future like Apple.

[Private 1st Class Jeffrey Bison]

I switched to an M1 Macbook at the end of 2020 and the greatest thing I can say about it is it produces no heat and battery life is long! It doesn't do this because it's not powerful, in fact I think the M1 chip is probably faster than the one inside the Steam Deck. The other great thing is Apple made Rosetta 2 and the transition was almost seamless, I barely noticed, they did such a good job like Valve did with Proton.

Getting my Steam Deck I quickly realised it has the big flaw that ARM gets rid of. I instantly notice heat and the fan is LOUD, but also the battery life is going down by the minute with just normal use. I'm only downloading a game and it is whirling the fan up and the battery started declining.

I understand why Valve went with x86 to make things simpler for their first device. However it would be so great if Valve could source their own M1 style ARM chip for the future. Then make Proton 2 that has x86 to ARM translation like Apple has done. We could then have amazing performance, great battery life and no fan needed.

[Clone303]

lol no thanks to anything Apple and lol what noize? you hear zero of it when you are playing and heat is nothing you can do about when it works hard and battery life is nothing you can do anything about because how batterys are right now, they maxed the battery tech

[Boblin the Goblin]

Valve's whole purpose with the Deck is to open up the door and encourage Linux development to make video games extremely accessible.

Your suggestion goes directly against that. There's a reason Apple is never recommended for gaming.

[Bee🐝]

Seriously, what noise and what heat?

I think there is an issue with your Deck...

(The battery is a non-issue as it is on par with any battery being asked to run incredibly intensive processes like AAA games.)

[Nathan]

Yeah x86 is far past the point of diminishing returns but I don't think we're even close to making that kind of leap in gaming.

[shadowboy813]

PC Games almost never target ARM. Virtualizing an x86 architecture from ARM would require emulation. That's a big performance hit. Valve went with an x86 architecture because it's a gaming device, and that's what games target.

[Moogal™]

You (OP) seem well read on the subject. I don't know what ARM is but if it can make for a better Steam Deck or PC/Mac whatever i would surely take it. I agree the SD gets kinda hot and has a noticable fan noise and somewhat short battery duration too.

[Minneyar]

Originally posted by Moogal™:

I don't know what ARM is but if it can make for a better Steam Deck or PC/Mac whatever i would surely take it.

ARM is a processor architecture, similar to but different from x86-64, which is the processor architecture that all modern desktop computers (and the Steam Deck) use. ARM chips tend to be more power-efficient and run cooler at low speeds than x86-64 CPUs do, which makes them very popular in small computing devices; that includes the Nintendo Switch, for example, which has better battery life than the Deck despite being half the size and weight.

The problem here is that programs must be compiled specifically to run on ARM in order to see any benefit, and every game on Steam is compiled for x86. While you could run games in an x86 emulator, the performance overhead of the emulator outweighs any benefits by far. Emulating a difference CPU architecture is far more complex than something like running Windows games through Proton, which just translates Windows library calls into equivalent Linux calls but doesn't have to use a different set of CPU instructions.

It's not inconceivable that somebody could develop an ARM chip for a new Steam Deck with an emulation layer than could play x86 Windows games at a reasonable speed, but that'd be a huge amount of work; keep in mind that Valve didn't make Proton from scratch, they just took WINE (which has been around for decades) and optimized it for gaming.

[CruiserBAX]

No. Because as others already said, the steam deck is a PC and virtually all PC games are developed and compiled for that architecture.

[tyl0413]

Hell no, way to burn all compatibility even Linux aside.
ARM only good bc it's more efficient which I get matters in a Deck like device but really it shouldn't. x86 is absolutely good enough rn and will only continue to get better there's absolutely no reason to throw away 30+ years of development and software and start from scratch unless you're a company like Apple that has to come up with meaningless fake innovations to continuously deceive people into buying their subpar products.
PC = x86 and that's how it should stay unless we really hit a hard cap on performance one day and if 100% emulation can be figured out, but as that's impossible it shouldn't ever happen hopefully.

[Krid]

The only way I could see this happening is if they went for heterogenous computing and offloaded back-end deck functions to an ultra-low-power chip. Otherwise it would just introduce bugs and performance bottlenecks, as seen with Apple's Rosetta.

[xenon001]

Originally posted by Minneyar:

Originally posted by Moogal™:

I don't know what ARM is but if it can make for a better Steam Deck or PC/Mac whatever i would surely take it.

It's not inconceivable that somebody could develop an ARM chip for a new Steam Deck with an emulation layer than could play x86 Windows games at a reasonable speed, but that'd be a huge amount of work; keep in mind that Valve didn't make Proton from scratch, they just took WINE (which has been around for decades) and optimized it for gaming.

Remember WINE = W.INE I.s N.ot an E.mulator. WINE/Proton "just" maps Windoes-OS-API calls to Linux API calls. So the CPU executes directly the same game binary as in Windows. When you change the CPU (to M1) you need a virtual mashine or a new binary. Thats what Apple does. On top: Many older games does not scale(well) with more cores. Multicore is the point of a M1.

[Moogal™]

It seems most ppl in this thread are hardware engineers :P I feel very ignorant on the subject.

[thedonmoose]

Originally posted by Moogal™:

It seems most ppl in this thread are hardware engineers :P I feel very ignorant on the subject.

Agreed. Lots of ignorance in this thread.

First of all, lots of people are sensitive to the word Apple so a few of these posts are literally discounting ARM because the word "Apple" is in the title. Pretty childish.

Originally posted by shadowboy813:

PC Games almost never target ARM. Virtualizing an x86 architecture from ARM would require emulation. That's a big performance hit. Valve went with an x86 architecture because it's a gaming device, and that's what games target.

RE: Emulation, it's actually not so bad. Rosetta 2 has pretty decent performance here on the M1 Max chip:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/qhwvc9/25_games_tested_under_apple_m1_max/hifodib/

- Shadow of The Tomb Raider gets 90 FPS on 1080 High settings
- The Witcher 3 gets 45-50 FPS on 1200p High settings
- DARK SOULS III gets 60 FPS on 1080P High settings
- etc.

Then you see some games that have native support like Baldurs Gate 3 in early access (at the time) was getting 120 FPS on 1440P Ultra. Disco Elysium is getting 120 FPS on 1440P Max settings on native as well.

And this was pulled from a post in 2021. These numbers above are literally as good or better than what the SD produces and we're talking about a MUCH more efficient chip. Like we can get low TPU + not even a need for a fan. The MacBook Airs have amazing performance before throttling and they just have a large heatsink.

ARM is absolutely the future, especially for handhelds and servers -- anything where power draw is a concern. Valve would be smart to get ahead of it early in the SD2 refresh whenever that will come out and push ARM development on game devs like they pushed Linux on game devs. Microsoft have already started the ARM push a couple of years ago themselves.

[Haruspex]

I was initially impressed with the efficiency of Apple silicon, and it got me thinking that the future of PC could potentially be ARM.

But then AMD dropped this bombshell:
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/05/amd-new-chips-against-m1-pro/

More powerful and more efficient than Apple's ARM based chip while still maintaining x86/64 backwards compatibility.

The future of PC isn't ARM. Apple is free to continue down the path of locking down their Mac platform into a walled garden like iOS though.

Fun fact: Linux has passed MacOS among Steam users for the first time according to the Steam Hardware Survey. This is largely due to the success of the x86/64 based Steam Deck.

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by Haruspex:

I was initially impressed with the efficiency of Apple silicon, and it got me thinking that the future of PC could potentially be ARM.

But then AMD dropped this bombshell:
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/05/amd-new-chips-against-m1-pro/

More powerful and more efficient than Apple's ARM based chip while still maintaining x86/64 backwards compatibility.

The future of PC isn't ARM. Apple is free to continue down the path of locking down their Mac platform into a walled garden like iOS though.

Fun fact: Linux has passed MacOS among Steam users for the first time according to the Steam Hardware Survey. This is largely due to the success of the x86/64 based Steam Deck.

OP, emulating x86 on Arm will not provide much power benefit because you eat translation costs. In addition, M1 Mac have TSO implementation in hardware to efficient x86 emulation. M1 is a huge chip.

I do not think AMD can emulate all the gains in M1 Mac because M1 have a huge reorder buffer with 8 instruction decoders. The max for x86 is 4 decoders at the moment. The huge reorder buffer allows the chip to find better more opportunities for instruction level parallelism to fill the extremely wide execution. These advance makes the chip huge and I do not know whether Valve can throw money at the problem like that. You might as well forgo a OLED screen.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25165214
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2