Apparently, the Snapdragon is just as good as a Radeon 780M used in the ROG Ally and Legion Go, but how is the game compatibility and the X86-64 emulation. :bunhdthink:
@chikorita157 Apple suffers from not having stellar GPU, but has good CPU and power usage. But I can’t for the life of me see any of their chips in anything outside their own devices.
Qualcomm (snapdragon and such) sees to have poor power usage in the past. I think that’s their biggest issues (since power equals heat and poor battery life).
I’m curious of if AMD will ever get one of their GPUs into an ARM platform (they don’t seem to want to themselves, for some weird reason), as a fast GPU would make such a big difference.
Nvidia seems to be supplying Nintendo in the future, but otherwise seems uninterested in this whole segment. AI all the way for those guys.
BUT, imho, generic ARM based handhelds are a function of software support. If there’s no games, nobody will care. Doesn’t matter if their solve the OS portion. Also I don’t see any Rosetta like layer helping here at all.
I’d like to see it happen, but I’d be surprised if it does and is a success outside of emulation machines or handheld Android gaming.
@yon If Valve can work out a X86-64 translator on Linux in Proton to make it happen, then maybe ARM in handhelds can become a reality and will certainly improve the battery life of the Steam Deck and other handhelds.
The Windows on ARM x86-64 emulator is a mixed bag when I tried it in Parallels on an Apple Silicon Mac in an insider build of Windows 10. The 3DMark score wan’t that good, given it’s running in a test version of Parallels on an M1, not a Max.
Apple Silicon really needs a better GPU, it’s not up to par compared to Nvidia and AMD.
@chikorita157 Question is where are they going to get the expertise for it? It’s quite a specific piece of software to build after all. Plus it can’t be as fast as Rosetta unless they add specific hardware support to help the translation.
Valve doesn’t sound like a company that would create, staff, and maintain a team like that.
I think there’s a better chance that they could convince developers to compile versions for ARM, but the dev tools needs to be good first. Should be a checkbox to get going.
Apple is behind, and I’m curious of what their play is. Seems like the more chiplets (is that the word?) they connect the faster things goes. Ergo the on die memory etc.
Will we see dual chiplet A series chips in the pro models in the future?
@yon The thing is, game developers aren't compiling on ARMArch64 already, meaning they not going to do it ever. If Valve wants to make ARM happen, they would need to make the existing X86-64 emulator like Box64 improved like they do with Proton. As long Wintel has a dominance, it's not going to change and Windows X64 emulation under Windows for ARM isn't that great.
Not sure about Chiplet design, but isn't Intel doing that with it's Ultra processors, and it's still bad. Reading from the reviews of the MSI Claw, it uses more power than AMD and the performance from the Arc graphics isn't good enough, especially with the compatability.
Of course, Apple can do a better job with the M4, but I probably going to wait until M5 or M6 to upgrade and probably the Max model with 64 GB of RAM.
@chikorita157 The way I see it x86 handhelds are basically a folded laptop. So the market for ARM is pretty much nil. There’s no reason for anyone to recompile right now. Hardware has to come first.
MS has (or at least had) a very good team when it comes to emulating CPUs. The PPC emulation so you can play XBox 360 games is very good. If AMD64->ARM64 is bad one Windows, that’s either as good as it gets, or they don’t care. Or somewhere on that scale.
If the tooling is good enough that it isn’t difficult to compile for the other platform, then Valve wouldn’t have to do much to get companies to do so. Give them some free promotion or 5% extra of the profits for a year for ARM and they are golden.
But I don’t seem them building an actually efficient CPU emu layer anytime soon.
Then again kinda moot. No hardware out there that’s sold in more than tiny amounts.
@chikorita157 Chiplets aren’t fast/slow in and by themselves. It’s just so you can put multiple dies next to each other to get more cores. The cores can be good or bad.
Pretty sure AMD/Nvidia are doing the same thing or similar, or will. Plus makes it easier to scale product ranges.
Apple doesn’t care about fast GPUs for games, so that won’t make a difference. Might end up with real fast pro graphics though. But Apple really needs to start thinking more about their pro users. The latest Mac Pro was a massive “What?”, and the software needs so much more Pro.
I still kinda want a dirt cheap ARM laptop to run Linux or a BSD on. Just so I can get some basic development and such going on it. Do not want fans. But in the end I might try to find a 16GB M1 air instead.
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