An issue with these handhelds is they don’t use chips comparable to the Deck: cheap, yet GPU heavy. They’re wasting a lot of die area/power in something aimed at laptops.

…Which is because the Deck chip was kind of a fluke.

First, know that silicon plans take many, many years from initial sizing/planning to ending up in PCs. Changes can’t be made at the last second.

Second, IGPs don’t really need a lot of CPU to be “balanced” with their small GPUs. If anything, extra CPU saps TDP the GPU could use due to scheduling issues, excessive clocking and such.

Anyway, well before the Steam Deck release, a weird chip called “Van Gogh” showed up on leaked AMD roadmaps. I think it was aimed as 2-in-1s/tablets in marketing, slotting in at just 4 cores, but with newer graphics than the laptop chips higher in the lineup.

But it never showed up in anything. The unconfirmed rumor is that big PC OEMs looked at it and decided fewer cores just wasn’t as marketable. It appears that Valve swooped in and took what was essentially the black sheep of AMD’s lineup, coincidentally perfect for an affordable handheld.

…Problem is, AMD canceled the line before that. They slashed its sucessors from their future lineups well before the Steam Deck took off as a runaway success.

Hence, the problem we have now is that every handheld after the deck is essentially using adapted laptop silicon, built for higher clocks, more CPU, burst performance, and more “general” tasks instead of being laser focused for sustained graphics performance on battery. “High end” isn’t really high end, unless they somehow squeeze a single-CCD AI Max chip in.

Windows? 🤢