Comment by dansalvato
2 days ago
From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to Arm):
> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.
Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.
Agree but I would argue RISC is catching up fast.
It’s not even close. Samsung alone ships around 400 million phones a year, that’s 400 million ARM devices a year from a single manufacturer. The number of total consumer ARM devices sold each year is in the billions.
RISC-V total total estimated market value is only around $10 billion, and I strongly suspect a single RISC-V chip cost more than a dollar. RISC-V manufacturing needs to increase something in the order of 1000X just to match ARM volumes, and even then it’ll be half a decade for RISC-V devices to build up meaningful market share of actual in-use devices, given there’s many billions of ARM devices out there which will remain perfectly usable for many years.