[piltdownman]

So why on earth did ARM sue to stop their release and force a clean-sheet redesign? Other than SoftBank being Softbank.

//ARM’s CEO wrote in a contemporaneous internal message that the Nuvia ALA “had left a route to blow a hole in [ARM’s] revenue plan” because “Qualcomm already ha[d] a v9 architecture license” under its own ALA. That observation led him to vent that “I’m struggling not to be pissed that we set up a route for Qualcomm to collapse the payments to Arm,” which “feels like in our chess game we left ourselves very exposed.”

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/delawar...

Re: Handheld gaming - The dedicated Xbox gaming handheld was cancelled because AMD required a minimum of 10 million units in its contract. With Steam Deck only selling ~5 million units and ASUS ROG/Lenovo Legion only selling 1-2 million MS didn't want to take the risk.

Reduce that BOM, go with ARM, and realise there's an incumbent leaving the market, and you have a compelling argument for Qualcomm. Particularly given the Nintendo Switch 2 sold 1.6M units in June, the highest launch month unit sales for video game hardware in US history

[ACCount37]

Good luck getting anywhere close to Nintendo Switch sales with anything that's not Nintendo Switch.

Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude from that? That was already an unlikely feat.

[piltdownman]

One of the main use-cases of the Steam Deck? Wii-U and Switch emulation!

Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude on their first handheld hardware launch, without some of the largest exclusive gaming IP in the world, selling direct to consumer... represent salient arguments for its ability to compete at a far greater extent when on more equal terms.