LastDudeALiveIntel might have a viable option at that point as well. Specifically, the Low-Power Island design and being able to turn the bigger CPU cores completely off is really good design for handhelds. Imagine an Intel chip with a beefy Xe3 or Celestial iGPU, and two LPE cores to run it while you're not gaming, and 4 or 6 P cores to handle the gaming.

chrcolukMore frequent updates is anti consumer, long gap between generations is a good thing.
Also I would say the steam deck is still the best steam handheld product, superior to asus, lenova etc. because of its much more reasonable price point.

Instead of using a semi-custom AMD APU, Valve is expected to use an off-the-shelf AMD APU that won't require any custom tuning from AMD to meet Valve's needs. This is welcome news, as the latest Steam Machine showed that Valve's reliance on a semi-custom APU solution made the hardware "obsolete" quickly while the rest of the industry advanced

FizzypopI thought the steam deck chip was originally designed for the MS surface and was latter rejected. They eventually went with Qualcom a few years latter. It was on the shelf waiting for a use case until steam came along and because it was no longer on cutting edge tech it was cheap. Cut down, under clocked laptop chips maynot cut it, the Z1 and Z2 are operating in a higher power and hardware tier and also operating system.

They are also operating on a different price tier, a yesteryear design with deactivated cores, using c cores and disabled io, clocked low may suit Steam for there handheld. Steam desk will need to be more powerful, a quad channel laptop chip using old Treadripper io die will scare the competition.

TheGeekn°72problem with Intel's chips is that unlike AMD's, you need to allocate PCB space to put in a chipset (unless that changed recently but I wasn't made aware of such a change in their tech)
that's why you can have things like ASRock's X600 boards & the Steam Machine that straight up don't have a PCH chip to handle the I/O because the I/O die on the CPU/APU handles it all
that said, I know there's the Claw out there with the 155H chip and I wonder how that one handles itself relative to all the AMD-based handhelds and if Intel would be interested to compete in that device segment
although I'll be honest, I suspect we're gonna see an increasing amount of ARM-based HHDs, Android handhelds are already there & SteamOS on ARM is coming through the Frame, if the Deck 2 is an x86 APU, I wouldn't be surprised if Valve already engaged in R&D with some Qualcomm APUs to see what kinda chip they can shove in there, put SteamOS on ARM on and get running to see what are the current limitations
if not them, then the "PC emulator on Android" devs are at least, we got CP77 running on Snapdragon 8 Elite gen5 after all...

LastDudeALiveThere is quite a lot of integrated IO on Intel mobile CPUs. On desktop they've chosen to give mobo partners flexibility, but look at the IO on Panther Lake. 4x Thunderbolt 4, 10 USB ports, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth, etc.

TheGeekn°72oh, alright then, guess I jumped the gun a little fast on this... makes me wonder why there's even that much I/O on a mobile SKU, who's gonna use 10 USB ports there?

TheGeekn°72oh, alright then, guess I jumped the gun a little fast on this... makes me wonder why there's even that much I/O on a mobile SKU, who's gonna use 10 USB ports there?

GenericUsername2001Or even just a standard motherboard for hand helds (I propose we call it HH-ATX) that you could swap out with higher performance parts as needed would be nice; stuff like controllers or screens go obsolete a lot slower than internal parts do. And maybe a standard battery too. The handheld market is still relatively young & growing, so it would be nice to force standard now, rather than end up in a situation like laptops where there that sort of thing is only shared at best among a few models from one manufacturer.

TechLurkerWould be nice if Steam pulled a Framework and worked with a few AIB providers to make standardized "HHTX" motherboard+CPU sets that could be replaced/upgraded easily, while reusing the existing shell, drives, and peripherals. Then sell a "Steam Case" that allowed reusing of the old motherboard as a thin client. Again, similar to what Framework's been doing to try and reduce e-waste and extend use of old and still usable components.

Panther_SeraphinWhat I can see happening is something like a refined Pro HX 470 or maybe a Pro 385 on a current node in 2027/28 being offered in the same 5-30 watt power envelope of the current deck. With the growth/normalistaion of DLSS/FSR etc I can see them using frame gen to making 1080p the default option.

Also we have to see what UDNA brings to gaming performance and if they will utilise that?

LastDudeALiveI mean, wasn't the entire reason Valve needed a semi-custom APU for the Steam Deck in the first place was because there literally was not anything like it before? Nvidia Tegra's were the only existing chips that would meet the requirements (which is why they're used in the Switch), and they were obviously a non-starter due to ARM CPUs and Nvidia drivers on Linux.

The Steam Deck essentially created the handheld PC gaming market, which is why there are lots of chips from AMD and Intel catering to that specific need now. So of course there's no reason to demand a semi-custom chip again now that AMD is designing APUs for this specific market.

LastDudeALiveThere is quite a lot of integrated IO on Intel mobile CPUs. On desktop they've chosen to give mobo partners flexibility, but look at the IO on Panther Lake. 4x Thunderbolt 4, 10 USB ports, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth, etc.