The exact quote:
It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.
It’s a completely different discussion if you throw ARM into the mix.
surprisingly not most of the time I checked.
Laptop/Mobile x86 seemed rather competetive to Laptop/Mobile ARM in performance/Watt
Well, let me rephrase it: it’s a completely different discussion if you want to run Windows games on ARM without ridiculous performance losses due to translation from x86.
Until we get Proton running with near-native speeds on ARM like on x86 perf/watt isn’t really that important.
And given some recent news about Valve working on an ARM emulator and funding Arch Linux to help them start supporting ARM as well they might be working towards that. Though if that is for the deck 2 or something else further in the future is yet to be seen.
It’s rumored to be for new standalone VR.
But, well, future is a long time, especially on Valve Time. ;)