this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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It looks to me like Valve's focus is on price and battery life. I think it will try to get something balanced that doesn't necessarily compete with the state-of-the-art AMD APUs. I'd still guess that Valve will release something in the next 2 years, otherwise it will get too far behind what other mobile consoles offer, and the current Deck will struggle in too many games.
So I'd say that it will be newer tech but still low spec. On the CPU side 4 core Zen 4c would likely be a big enough update. On the GPU front AMD still doesn't have anything significantly better than RDNA 2. It will be interesting to see what RDNA 3.5 brings to the table, though RDNA 4 is certainly an option. A custom design with some cache to alleviate the RAM bottleneck might be an option.
Yes, this puts them on equal footing with Microsoft and Sony, which implies that the Steam Deck is selling very well.
I wouldn't quite say that. Significant chunks of RDNA2 go back to Microsoft telling AMD things that they required from the graphics architecture of the next Xbox, back in 2016. I'm sure Sony did similar.
Valve in this case was able to take advantage of this increased R&D aspect of RDNA2 and get a custom chip based on it, but I don't think they would have that same position in the development of the architecture, if that makes sense.
Of course, I'm a beneficiary of all of the above!
I'd say that it's true that the custom work done by AMD for Microsoft and Sony is more extensive than for Valve, but Valve did get a custom APU and a 6nm refresh of it. That's something that no other companies except for Sony and Microsoft are getting.