Source is KeplerL2, who is generally considered a reliable source for insider hardware info, particularly on AMD GPU hardware and AMD SoC for consoles.
Previously I would have personally estimated Steam Deck 2 to release mid 2026-early 2027, but the recent info about an upcoming Steam Machine made me think that maybe I should push back that estimate.
Of course even if we assume this is reliable insider info, a lot can change in couple years, so things can definitely change.
At this stage, it’s likely they’ll move to RISC-V over ARM if they change architecture. Drastically freer licensing would give them more control and fewer headaches.
Proton isn’t the same as an architecture emulator. It wraps the Windows APIs and translate them to Linux system calls. Translating CPU instructions is more complicated because it’s much more latency and overhead sensitive, and slight architectural differences can drastically blow up performance hits to translation. You need hardware based emulation for some instructions.
Yeah I was just using proton as an example of a translation layer that made the steamdeck possible. RISC-V would be great. The Steamdeck adopting it would also push far more development and refinement in the Linux kernal for that architecture too.