Posted by evolve2k 12/2/2025
As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep that is like ARM.
There’s a lot of work and experience built up for ARM through Proton and other tech (that can be reverse engineered to see how it works) like Rosetta. A lot of that would have to be redone for RISCV. Seems like a lot of risk in the short term for what’s not an obvious product benefit.
I would expect the high-end RISCV market to mature before a company like Valve dives in.
You can even omit that part and the result is the same: nothing
Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.
RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations for the time being.
> 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.
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.
This has held back Arm for years, even today the state of poor GPU drivers for otherwise good Arm SoCs. There is essentially a tiny handful of Arm systems with good GPU support.
ARM is Western
RISC is China / Eastern
Valve is just trying to outflank Microsoft here. And they're doing a magnificent job of it.
Microsoft has on at least half a dozen occasions tried to draw a box around Valve to control their attempts to grow beyond the platform. And moreover to keep gaming gravitas on Windows. Windows Store, ActiveX, Xbox, major acquisitions ... they've failed to stop Valve's moves almost every time.
Linux, Steam Box, Steam Machine - there's now incredible momentum with a huge community with more stickiness than almost any other platform. Microsoft is losing the war.
The ARM vs RISC battle will happen, but we're not there yet. There also isn't enough proliferation for it to be strategic to Valve.
RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley. It's roughly as Western as West realistically gets, short of being made in Hawaii.
> That's a geopolitical question
Sure, but that's not actually about where RISC-V is from. It's that it's a purposely open platform -- so much so that its governing body literally moved to Switzerland.
The reason it's a geopolitical question is more to do with what we did to their supply chains with sanctions on companies like Huawei and ZTE, and what COVID did to everyone's supply chains independently of that. Both of those things made it really evident that some domestic supply chains are critical. (On both sides -- see: the CHIPS Act)
Where RISC-V comes back in is that open source doesn't really have a functioning concept of export restrictions. Which makes it an attractive contingency plan to develop further in the event of sanctions happening again, since these measures can and have extended to chip licenses.
(Edit: I'm not saying any of this is mutually exclusive with valid concerns about Huawei, raised by various other sources. I'm less familiar with ZTE's history, but my point in either case is more of a practical one.)
That doesn't matter any more than, IDK, the first maid cafes being American. China is where RISC-V is getting adopted, they're the ones who are running with it.
Imo this is a really strange characterization of RISC. I've never seen this before. I think you try to paint a misleading picture in bad faith, please consider this: - https://riscv.org/blog/how-nvidia-shipped-one-billion-risc-v... - https://tenstorrent.com/en/ip/risc-v-cpu - https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc... - https://www.sifive.com - ... - https://riscv.org/about/ -> "RISC-V International Association in Switzerland"
US policy makers are actively attacking RISC-V and dissuading its use.
China has an increasingly large upper hand in the RISC-V ecosystem and can use that to remove Western surveillance and replace it with their own.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c...
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/regarding-proposed-u...
I suspect that many projects—such as BOOM—have stalled as a consequence of this situation. If it continues, the long-term impact will be highly detrimental for everyone involved, including stakeholders in Western countries.
While achieving an open-core design comparable to Zen 5 is unlikely in the near term, a sustained open-source collaborative effort could, in the long run, significantly change the situation. For example, current versions of XiangShan are targeting ~20 SPECint 2006/GHz (early where at ~9).
Stuff tends to stay open until a new leader emerges. Then the closed source shell appears.
We've seen this with the hyperscalers and in a million other places.
Use open to pressure and weed out incumbents and market leaders. Then you're free to do whatever.
So we'd be replacing NSA spying with MSS spying.
That's why this is geopolitical.
The DoD and Five Eyes prefer ARM, where the US maintains a strong lead.
ARM is a RISC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_comput...
Which is reducing the complexity of control schemes to either nothing or mortal kombat like combos.
Forward, down, forward, high punch to build a new city in a 4X in a few years?
Hmmm I don't know. I did play Elden Ring & Clair Obscur with a controller but I also played Baldur's Gate 3 on mouse and keyboard. I also play VR games with controllers or hand tracking. Basically I play with whatever the game recommends.
To me it's like saying PC game is dead because mobile phone is so popular. Sure a LOT of players, and thus money, goes into mobile gaming but that doesn't prevent proper AAA and indies games on PC to have interesting mechanics.
PS: if you are into these kind of things checkout exotic controllers in events like Amaze. I remember a collaborative where you had to blow in pipes to push a rocket in the right direction and plenty of weirder stuff. Really cool but totally niche.
I play soulsbornes on consoles with a controller, of course. Because From doesn't know how to do any other control scheme, they have "console DNA".
But how do you play Civilization (<= 5, the good ones) with a controller?
Like "kill 100.000 mobs" ?
With the 2 options you have left because those are all the buttons :)
And autoaim because those sticks aren't precise enough.
But it's not first person shooters I worry about, because those have devolved into competitive multiplayer IAP fests that create toxic communities.
I worry about strategy games and anything with a whiff of complexity. Reduce options because going through menus with a controller is slow and clunky. Reduce options because when playing at TV distance you can't read a serious list of properties like wargames have.
If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then surely the result would be more games that are playable with only a keyboard, not fewer?
It was back in the days when we gathered at the kid whose keyboard could actually support so many simultaneous keypresses and did tournaments.
There is not so much support from companies to this project that I know of, but the people behind box64 manage to make it a solid and fast solution to running windows game on arm.
The future actually looks pretty good for indie gaming development on the Android platform, Google's shenanigans notwithstanding.