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curl-6 on 18 April 2023
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EpicRandy said:
curl-6 said:

I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure it's not as simple as just die shrinking a chipset designed for a home console and stuffing it into a handheld. 

The demands of a portable system are quite different than a big box plugged into the mains. You can't just use the same RAM, for instance. You'd have to change the hardware to the point where it wouldn't be "the same device" any more.

It's actually not that different the main challenge is to get targeting a low enough TDP. Once the TDP is down, all components associated with power delivery can also be reduced in number and/or scaled down. Also, Mobile devices getting power from a battery are more efficient since it doesn't need to convert the power from AC to DC.

There are already many such devices that exist today, the steam dec, ayaneo 2, and OneXplayer. All of those use RDNA 2 graphics the same as the SeriesX and S. They are not as powerful as the S but not that far behind either. Asus is also looking to produce its own with the Asus ROG Ally. Even if MS doesn't end up producing such a device on their own, a series S-like performance target in a mobile device is really only like 1-2 years away using mid-range laptop apu. 

They tend to have bottlenecks and strengths in different places though, bandwidth for example is often lower for portables, for example the Steam Deck and PS4 aren't that far apart in power, but the PS4 has twice the GB/s, while Switch's bandwidth is only slightly above PS3/360 despite it outperforming them significantly in GPU and RAM capacity.