Steam Deck Handheld & Tech News: Water Cooling & GitHub Copilot

The Valve Steam Deck

The hosts dive into the announcement of the Valve Steam Deck, a powerful, handheld PC designed to play AAA games on the go.

Key Ergonomics and Features

• Ergonomic Design: The layout resembles a Wii U gamepad with thumbsticks positioned at the top, which the hosts praise for comfort.
• Touch Input: Features dual 32.5mm touchpads with improved latency and HD haptics, allowing for precise control and ambidextrous use.
• Internal Hardware: Built with an AMD APU (Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architecture), 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and a 7-inch 800p display.
• Versatility: The device runs SteamOS 3.0 (Arch Linux based) using Proton to run Windows games, but users are free to install alternative OSs like Windows.

Discussion on Pricing and Competition

"This is a full computer for $400. This is basically Chromebook-level pricing."

• The hosts argue that the pricing is aggressive and excellent for the hardware provided, comparing it favorably to specialized devices like the Aya Neo.
• They note that while joysticks are notoriously prone to drift across the industry, they hope Valve prioritizes robustness.

Future Tech and Software Developments

TSMC & On-Chip Water Cooling

• Researchers at TSMC are exploring integrated silicon microchannels to cool high-density chips directly on-die.
• This direct water cooling technique could dissipate massive heat loads, though it is currently targeted at enterprise applications rather than consumer PCs.

GitHub Copilot

• The emergence of GitHub Copilot as an AI-powered coding assistant has sparked debate.
• While it promises to lower barriers to entry for new developers by auto-completing complex functions, it faces controversy regarding the use of scraped open-source code for training datasets and potential licensing infringements.

Intel & Alder Lake

• Leaks regarding Intel's Alder Lake processors suggest a big-little architecture with high performance, potentially challenging AMD's market dominance, which the hosts find promising for healthy industry competition.