[rincebrain]

I would be surprised if they moved to ARM any time soon, because even if the CPUs can punch that hard, they're definitely not competing on the GPU front, from what I understand of the state of the art outside of Apple, so they're gonna wind up with a dGPU anyway if they did.

Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing with even the existing Steam Deck on GPU performance. Looking at [1] for a ballpark number on Snapdragon GPU performance doesn't seem encouraging.

[1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/the-snapdragon-x-elites-adreno-...

[omikun]

The X2 [1] is suppose to be more competitive now.

[1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/qualcomms-snapdragon-x2-elite

[orthoxerox]

Does ARM support PCIe, by the way? Or has no one combined ARM with a dGPU because it's ridiculous to combine a low-voltage CPU with a space heater from Nvidia?

[MayeulC]

The PCI bus has nothing to do with the instruction set. Usually it is just a block a designer can add to a chip, and connect to an internal bus like AXI, give or take a few other adjustments on the chip. You can have PCIe buses without proper CPUs, even: it's quite common to find them paired with FPGAs.

For instance, Rasberry Pis have had a PCI bus for a few generations now, at first used for USB3. The Pi 5 breaks it out on a dedicated connector, making it easy to plug external devices: https://raspberrytips.com/pcie-raspberry-pi5/ (random link).

Of course, discrete GPUs are less ideal from a power efficiency perspective (duplicated memory controller, buses, and power circuits), so they wouldn't fit the Steam Deck. But write a big enough check, and I'm sure that AMD or Intel would be willing to share their iGPU designs. NVidia also makes Tegras.

[dralley]

AMD has an ARM chip in the works, and there's nothing about RDNA which makes it unsuitable for use alongside ARM.