smoothbrain coldtakes

I think it’s prudent to be on an older node, using stock that’s more abundant, even if it’s older - especially if it still performs the duties well enough. You’re 100% on the cost side of things, especially considering that Nintendo has never had any consoles that were crazy expensive. Everything was always supposed to be family friendly and therefore family attainable.

I still think battery life is a higher concern for them than sheer power when in handheld mode though, and that’s a key differentiating factor between a Deck and a Switch, besides the Nintendo first-party library and chip architecture. It’s really cool that the Deck is flexible enough to do both high performance and low performance tasks with toggles for the draw.

The performance was never the consideration for Nintendo. They want a handheld that can last a long time, so they will always clock their chips down. You can’t compare 30 watts all the time to 30 watts plugged in, let alone 5 watts in handheld mode.

Steam Decks are great, but lets be real; when you play a big AAA title, even on moderate settings, you might get two hours out of the machine pushing it to the limit at full TDP.

This is kind of a nothingburger story. We always knew Nintendo were not going to scale their machines up to the level of PC gaming handhelds.

I remember it being one of my favored chosen out of the plethora of random third party devices I had laying around. This was a step above Mad Catz for sure, but definitely still below the original controllers.

This is a Nyko Air Flow controller. I had one for the original Xbox. It was supposed to keep you from sweating during long sessions of gameplay, because it was ventilated and had a fan on the back. To be honest, I don’t remember it being excellent at keeping you cool. I think the fan was pretty lousy, but it was a great gimmick none the less.

I had a lot of weird controllers back then. Some good, some bad. Most of them Mad Catz.

This article takes a bunch of time to really just say nothing. Like of course if you ask non-techies what brands they can think of they’re going to rattle off Disney and Starbucks before Nvidia.

The average person doesn’t know Nvidia the same way they don’t know other hardware manufacturers down to the component, especially for datacenter scenarios. They’re not going to be able to list things that are driving forces in the tech industry, because it’s not anything they will be able to interact with day-to-day. The average person doesn’t run the LLM themselves. PC gamer knowledge is also pretty peripheral

As the most valued company during a gold rush, does it really matter how much the average person knows your name if all the people with the money already do? It’s not like my mother and my sister are going to be buying graphics cards to run LLMs any time soon. There’s clearly a clientele for this and it’s not the average person. The fact that they produce consumer equipment is literally not at all what’s giving them their new valuation.

Yeah, the Windows handhelds are basically glorified laptops. This was kind of the approach with the ROG ALLY anyways with the XGM port, allowing connection to an eGPU enclosure with up to a 4090 inside. It just runs a full blown version of Windows and you can even put on a pro license and do dumb shit like have WSL or Hyper-V available on the device.

I have a ROG ALLY and I’ve debloated it to hell, but it’ll never match the power savings I would achieve if it was Linux-based.

I’ve been following Chimera and Bazzite on their progression for developing distros for the Windows handhelds, but it’s going to be a while before they will be fully viable on any handhelds.

Steam will always be ahead because they control the hardware and the software and they are able to fine tune the software to their very specific hardware, which is simply not happening for the Windows handhelds.

Yeah, but it doesn’t come standard on these devices. It’s literally just a full install of 11, with Teams and everything.

I am pretty sure the entire library is not available to stream, but you can install all of it on Windows. Bazzite is also not fully compliant with the hardware yet.

There’s a list of problems and workarounds, but it’s listed as gold rating which is better than a lot of other handhelds. I would not be able to stand the LEDs being at full brightness all the time, it would infuriate me.

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There are a few projects like Bazzite and Chimera which have versions for desktops and other handhelds, but they’re not really at maturity yet for the handhelds other than the Steam Deck.

Since they’re all running AMD hardware, what I anticipate is that eventually the Linux variants designed for them will be significantly more optimal for the devices, much more than the bullshit full Windows install. You do lose out on Gamepass games though, but that’s pretty much the only thing you gain by going Windows in the first place.

I compromised with my ROG Ally and ran a bunch of debloating scripts so I could have my Gamepass games available. I would rather be running Bazzite on it, which runs excellently on my laptop. It requires some funky BIOS fuckery to achieve basic functionality right now though, so it’s definitely a project to undertake later.

I think you are misunderstanding the article.

Windows for ARM is designed specifically for ARM, and it has the translation layer. The translation layer effectively allows it to function as if it’s running an x86 Windows install off the bat by offering the ability to run x86 applications on the ARM hardware. It’s not actually running an x86 OS.

The chipset is very powerful but it doesn’t require additional hardware to achieve this translation. The additional processing power built into these chips are NPUs (Neural Processing Units) which are designed to more effectively run ML/AI/LLM workloads. The translation system just works on the normal raw processing power of the machine, just the same as the M-series Macs.

On paper the Intel processor is much better than the Zen 1 Extreme chip, but lack of optimizations remains the main bottleneck.

I knew Intel would incrementally improve the support for the device, because we saw how they handled the Arc cards. They were not great at first but then a driver update was pushed that increased efficacy by almost double bringing the cards on par with low and mid-rangers from the other manufacturers.

Hopefully Intel’s support improves more and the field becomes additionally competitive.

Microsoft has a translation layer like Rosetta. It’s called Prism.

It does. Apple has Rosetta and Microsoft has Prism. They are effectively the same thing, being a translation layer for x86 to ARM.

TSMC equipment only has the materials to function for about two weeks before needing a shipment of replacement parts for the fabs when they wear out.

You can enable REBAR on older machines with a UEFI hack.

It’s been part of the PCI spec for ages but Nvidia and AMD only started using it recently.

You can check out the tool here.

I had a 1050ti in the machine and I bought an A770. It’s overpowered for transcoding but I do remotely stream games at 1080p, which is a good workout for the card.

For simple transcoding I would buy the A310 since it’s the cheapest card with AV1. I’m running an old 6th Gen i7-6600k and I had to mess with the UEFI to allow REBAR, but I used this tool to do it.

The new dedicated cards are actually very good. They sell them at a competitive price because they are not powerhouses, but they get the job done. If you’re targeting 1080p at your top end, it’s almost a no-brainer to go with an Arc card. If you’re pushing a higher resolution, it’s probably better to go with another manufacturer, unless you’re fine with higher resolutions and lower framerates.

I agree with the Arc cards.

They are good, they are cheap, and they’re targeting the midrange to low-end hardware segment which is not covered by any other manufacturer.

I have a 3090 in my desktop but I have an Arc card on my server for Moonlight/Sunshine streaming, as well as Plex transcoding. It’s the cheapest card to have AV1 encoding built in.

I also keep seeing them increase performance significantly with every driver update, which is pretty cool.

There is a hack to get ReBar on those older machines. I have a 6700k as well and it’s running a 1050ti, but this utility I heard about allows any modern system running a UEFI to have ReBar.