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> A switch to ARM64 (e.g. ARMv9.0) would likely over double the battery life at the bottom and top end. Only if the games are compiled for ARM64, and even then
by messe 4y ago
> A switch to ARM64 (e.g. ARMv9.0) would likely over double the battery life at the bottom and top end.
Only if the games are compiled for ARM64, and even then the performance improvements over x86 are not guaranteed compared to just switching to a better process node. A big attraction of the Steam Deck is the massive back catalog of already existing games on Steam, all of which are compiled for x86. If your ARM CPU is spending its time emulating x86, you're not going to get much of an improvement in battery life.
A Steam Deck v2, still running on an AMD CPU, but on TSMC 5 or 3nm, is more likely than one with an ARM64 processor.
- Someone1234 4y agoWe've seen with the M range of SoCs that even with the emulation overhead, you can gain battery life even accounting for that. Plus the OS itself would be natively compiled, so that's always an efficiency gain.
- messe 4y agoBut how much of that is because they were ARM vs being the first desktop-class CPUs on a 5nm process?
- Someone1234 4y agoBecause ARM64 is significantly more R&D dollars spent on it than x86-64. That's a trend that is going to continue. So the question is do you keep clinging to a slowly dying platform that is falling further and further behind, or do you go to the commodity platform that is going from strength to strength? The Steam Deck will wind up on ARM64 eventually, it is a matter of "when?" not "if?"