this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
490 points (98.4% liked)
Steam Deck
14810 readers
46 users here now
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I wonder whether, when the faster Steam Deck 2 comes, it may have ditched the x86 architecture altogether and leapt to a high-performance ARM CPU, yielding more power per watt and generating less heat. If so, that would presumably require Proton to be supplemented with a Rosetta-style translation engine that can convert x86 machine code into ARM.
Currently, outside of Apple’s proprietary M/A-series CPUs, there don’t appear to be high-performance ARM CPUs that would fill such a role, though this probably won’t still be the case in a few years.
I'd say while it's possible it's unlikely, remember that they're running PC games, all based on X86, the work needed to make Wine/Proton run all of that well on a different CPU set is significant, and would likely break compatibility in unexpected ways, effectively bringing all the recent wins moot and bringing Proton backwards. Definitely something that will likely happen, but more of a long-term goal (unless it's already in progress and with advances, no idea, but we would all have heard of it already if it was a thing)
With the timeframe this is likely to happen over, it might be RISC-V instead of ARM since that's an open source hardware platform and ARM seems to be joining enshittification trends (starting with worse licensing terms)
There allready is a transition layer that can be used so they wouldnt have to start from scratch. Box86/64
A few months ago I remember they hired a contractor for arm development, I think they were a member from the Asahi Linux project
That Asahi team have done some amazing stuff, especially on the graphics front. They've put out a fully conformant OpenGL driver for the M1+2, something even Apple themselves haven't done for their own hardware.
there already is a project for x86 to ARM translation on Linux called box86, and there's another one for x86_64 called box64 havent heard about them in a while but I remember seeing a video of someone playing doom 3 on a raspberry pi with it so it seems very promising
Apple fans before their favorite binary translator came out: qemur? Eww.. ELBRUS with lintel? Ewwwwww, you suck in past century!
Apple fans after their favorite binary translator came out: We have the Never Seen Before™ technology that was pionered by company we mindlessly praise.
They exists for many years. There are HPC cores in Cortex-A, entire Cortex-X and super HPC Neoverse cores, but they are rarely seen outside of datacenters.