I don't think Nintendo will even try to beat the specs of the steam deck. It's not a direct competitor anyway. Nintendo will just use hardware that is good enough for their purposes, but it won't be top notch or anything. Battery life will be more important anyway. So if the Switch 2 releases in 2023 or something, it will be on par with the Steam Deck at best if you ask me.

That said, the specs alone won't really determine which of the two is "better". That is entirely subjective. The Steam Deck will be better for me personally as I prefer the freedom I can only get on a PC. I would even prefer the Steam Deck if the Switch 2 gets a massive power upgrade over it, which is very unlikely. That said, if you love Nintendo games over all else, a Steam Deck won't do you any good with that, so a Switch 2 will be the better choice. I like both worlds, so I will get both devices anyway. And there's really no point in a direct comparison.

I don't expect a Switch 2 any time soon maybe around 2024. So naturally I would hope that it has better specs than what the Deck has but it's Nintendo we're talking about so who knows.

Why should it? RAM is very useful for multitasking apps and assets in video game environments (plus some other things). Nintendo has usually shown they could care less about those two things. 

If Switch 2 is better than a PS4 in terms of specs, or around a PS4 Pro, 16 GB is overkill. Why would Nintendo put that much in it? Putting 16 GB of RAM in the Switch 2 would be like if they launched the Switch with 8 GB RAM back in 2017.

Now if Switch 2 does have 16 GB of RAM, that's cool. I just doubt Nintendo will put that much in there. Capcom had to request for Nintendo to give the Switch 4 GB RAM. So that means the Switch probably would've launched with 2 GB RAM or a weird 3 GB of RAM if Capcom hadn't made their case with Resident Evil.

Nintendo is famous for skimping on certain specs or features in their hardware to keep the costs down. I couldn't see them having a device with 16 GB RAM until Switch 2 Pro or Switch 3.

Isn't Switch's ARM procesor architecture better than the Deck's x86 when you have native support in both?

I mean, if we have a Switch 2 with the same specs as Deck.

Really depends on the memory interface.
DDR5 should have twice the memory density as DDR4... In conjunction with much faster memory transfers.

Odd-ball numbers like 10GB will only be feasible if they go with an odd-ball memory interface. I.E. Each 2GB memory chip has 32bit bus for a 128bit memory interface in total... 10GB would bring it to 160bit.

Or they can do clamshell mode or somewhat... But it's not as elegant or as efficient.

Teraflops tells us absolutely nothing about performance. Nothing.

It's theoretical, not real world.

The RDNA2 chip in the Steamdeck is absolutely more efficient clock for clock, flop for flop than the Maxwell Tegra as well.

Nope.
Ryzen is in a different league compared to the antiquated ARM A57 cores.

The Switch 2 however would probably use Denver or such... Even then Ryzen gets an easy home run.

AMD is leading the industry right now... Which has been a blessing for the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X... They aren't using the worst CPU's one can find on the market again.

The Highly likely scenario is that Switch 2 will have DLSS 3.0 due to a NVidia GPU, the Steam Deck uses a AMD GPU so it wont, Switch 2 will have an advantage in performance efficiency  

Switch is also set up with easy local multiplayer in mind as well, this does give it great flexibility in game features  

Power efficiency of ARM will defeat X86 in tiny tablets. Look at the most powerful single thread chip, a budget mobile 15W chip beating its 125W desktop competition.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html#

On top of that Switch 2 will again have a console low level API vs LINUX/Windows bloat layers.

It would help if the thread wasn't so misleading to begin with. What makes a system 'better' is determined mostly by the software available and designed particularly for it.  If this thread is only about comparing specs then you should make that clear from the outset.

In specs probably the Steam deck, Nintendo wants to make profit on both hardware and software. Also the Switch 2 should at least have 6 hours of battery life, so it can probably pull less watts than the Steam deck.

This is essentially the good old "console vs PC" question, taken to the handheld realm. And the answer is ... it depends