Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can’t buy an M3 chip on its own
Why can’t someone else make one?
Because it’s a proprietary design? You’d have to reverse-engineer the whole chip, which is really hard to do on that process node
Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
131–140 of 327 posts
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.
I've done both. There are difficulties with both but overall I would say software is significantly more difficult than hardware. Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex. In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies…
Wow, super hard disagree, comment here sounds like the typical arrogance hardware engineers face from people in software who've never really done the job or have some superficial experiences.
I won't blindly state "software is easier" but software is definitely easier to modify, iterate and fix, which is why sofware tools and resulting applications can evolve so fast.
I have done both HW & SW, routinely do so, and switch between deep hardware jobs and deep software so I'm qualified to speak.
If you're blinking a light or doing something with Bluetooth you can buy microcontrollers that have this capability and yes that hardware is simple.
But have you ever DESIGNED a microcontroller, let alone a modern processor or complex system ?
Getting something "simple" like a microcontroller to reliably start-up involves complex power sequencing, making sure an oscillator works, a phase-locked-loop that behaves correctly and that's just "to make a clock signal run at a frequency" we're not talking about implementing PCIe Gen5 or RDMA over 100Gbps Ethernet.
Hardware engineers definitely welcome better tools but the cost of using an unproven tool or tool that might have "a few" corner cases resulting in your $5-million SoC not working is a hard risk to tolerate, so sadly(and to our pain) we end up using proven but arcane infrastructure.
Software in contrast can evolve faster because you can "fix it in software". New tools can be readily tested, iterated on and deployed.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
They made the new refund policy worldwide, which they absolutely did not have to.
Sure, but I imagine they saw the dominoes falling and realized that the optics of going down kicking and screaming in endless battles against basic consumer rights would be exceptionally bad. If they hadn't fully conceded then the EU would have been up their ass too before long.
> kicking and screaming in endless battles against basic consumer rights
“Apple has entered the chat.”
There are so many examples of other companies doing exactly that.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller, and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is the only product that open source and supports that vision. Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.
Steam Deck is not free software, is it? The repo[0] is basically an issue tracker and the hardware is not open either (but they're repair-friendly which is already an improvement over... everything else.) [0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS
They run their own Gitlab instance with many more steamos projects:
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a somewhat justified fear - the box screams 'home server' to me. Then again a Mac Mini is just $600
The steam machine is a $350 server + a $300 GPU + a $200 controller. A good deal for $500-$700, but only if you want the GPU and controller.
Something else worth considering in comparison to consoles is that the games you buy on the Steam machine can be played on other devices and they'll be available long after the games you bought on console this generation EOL.
I've wasted $1000+ on console games over the years that I don't have access to anymore, yet I can still install the first Steam game I bought decades ago.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#136The Steam Frame shows a lot of promise in terms of letting people play games on a massive virtual screen. But with the hardware, even more is possible. I hope they are working on a compatibility layer that allows 2D games to be rendered in 3D, like the 3D TV of the 2010s. In my opinion that would be a killer app.
Not sure if this is what you had in mind: Projected 2D views into a 3D "movie screen" environment is a feature of the Frame, per my understanding of their marketing, and of early reviewers' experiences.
If you meant, "do they take 2D render frames from videogames and convert them into pseudo-3d or actual 3d where the user can tilt their head to see a different view INTO the 2D game's universe, e.g. see behind bushes just by tilting head", then "no".
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#137Igalia is a superhero company doing a lot of great work with surprisingly little fanfare. Everytime their name pops up it's inevitably "oh some thankless extremely technical low level work leading to impressive/long-awaited features"
They are more of a co-op than a company btw.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#138> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing. Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
It’s incredible how bad driver support is the ARM space. I was looking into some of the various Ambernic handhelds and their Linux firmware. Despite their SoCs being advertised as having Vulkan 1.1 support every firmware for the device ships with it disabled.
I would recommend the Anbernic RG353M running ROCKNIX, or for a more powerful device, Retroid's Pocket 5 running ROCKNIX. Most other options have awful software support and are just e-waste, unfortunately.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#139> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing. Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
> Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS. Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they sell games. These devices are merely another storefront. Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community. Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by [mostly] doing…
Valve is private right? One of the reasons they are not pure evil is because they have the luxury of not needing to chase the magic dragon of inf growth. They can focus on product. Bet your ass if they were public u would see the slimiest shit coming out to eek every possible percent so bonuses are made.
I wish more companies were private for profit but not inf growth.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come to think of it, for them it is basically customer support. Most will want to outsource it as cheap as possible and/or push it to the community. They won't care if it takes an eternity for the customer to get their issues solved as long as new customers keep buying. And a few companies will see an opportunity to bring better customer care as an advantage and/or integrate it in their philosophy.
And it's the reason why for several years I didn't consider buying anything that had an AMD card (not now, but for many many years it was insanity).
Are you talking about the FGLRX drivers on Linux desktops?
Or their Windows driver quality back then?
I remember them both being pretty brutal.