Steam Deck

Number must go up

Nah. One big piece let's them fit more excellent inside.

Nothing yet surpassed Zen2 low power efficiency in the SD. And by low power I mean under 10W power/performance.

New chips scale quite a bit better above 10W though.

Also I'm not sure if that's actually the HW limitation or just Valve tuning of the power behaviour. It's possible they can throw in Zen5 and tune it to that efficiency level while getting significant performance uplift over Zen2 at the same power.

Regarding GPU we will need much faster memory support to get any significant advantages even with RDNA4 as most iGPUs are starved for memory bandwidth anyways, not saying that RDNA4 wouldn't be an improvement, just that it won't be as big as a leap as it could be with faster memory.

This reminds me of an old thread on a random forum. Just when Sims 2 was released they were speculating what Sims 3 would look like.

Someone suggested that the next game will surely be in the source engine!

While your point is more realistic than that I still don't think valve could pull this off in reasonable time. Translation for games is extremely hard to do right. I think if at all there will be another generation of decks before we see something like this.

Dynamic recompilation technology?

I dunno, I expect the Deck to last far longer than the average console if anything. It's a PC, so the games are pretty much guaranteed to keep coming for decades to come, as they have for decades past.

The hardware will fall behind, so I think the point where the newest Triple A games won't be playable will come within a few years, but I bet whatever visual novels or pixelated indie games release in 2035 will still run just fine on it.

Plus, it's designed to be repairable, unlike most consoles. And even if Valve stops maintaining SteamOS for the Steam Deck, you'll still be able to install other distros, so software support isn't something I'm very concerned about either.

It 100% could, everyone thinks they need to be able to generate kratos' abs, Cloud's spikes and Keanu....but they don't. (Removed an extra an)

It's kind of just becoming an indie or old game portable pc to me. Don't personally have much interest in playing modern graphically demanding titles on it.

Shoot. My back log on games is so big, I can be happy with this one for another 5 years before I'd need something with more power.

There are a ton of PC gamers who think the only way to play a video game is 1440p 60-144fps and anything below that is unplayable. The reality is the steam deck is a 720p 30fps handheld device that can occasionally make it to 60fps if pushed far enough.

IMHO a device that can run a game like God of war Ragnarok at 30fps in handheld mode and still play fine when docked is succeeding on the performance front in several aspects. In comparison, the switch version of Wolfenstein the new Colossus had to remove entire sets of geometry to even hit 30fps where the deck can hit that easily with the same settings without removing geometry and using AMD FSR. I think the deck has at least 3 more years in it before we even start to see any needed upgrades at that performance. Only time will tell.

Never in my life have I regretted putting more RAM into my computers. When faced with deciding between similarly priced graphics cards going with the higher RAM option was always the right choice in the long run. Because higher resolution textures always make an otherwise low game look great.

If I knew an adventurous spirit with great soldering skills and greater insurance I would go for the 32 GB upgrade on my Deck.

Main downside is that having swappable components adds size and cost, which is why laptops are so much less modular than full size PCs. For something like the Deck, which is trying to be as small and cheap as possible, I doubt we'll see anything modular for a long time.

Valve could possibly sell upgraded motherboards that you could use with your original screen/etc. However before ifixit sold deck parts, there was a leak of the upcoming parts and prices. At the time, replacement motherboards were planned to be sold, but they planned to sell the motherboard for $350 (when the cheapest deck was $400). Ultimately they ended up never selling the motherboard, which makes sense when considering how expensive it was compared to the overall price of the unit.