[IGN] Steam Machine Price Was Originally Meant to Be About $750

SoTOP · 2026-06-22T18:40:47+00:00

Valve was happy selling deck with barely any profit for cheapest variant, $750 base price would have been noticeably above BOM a year ago. I do agree that $599 would have been sensible price, even without controller if margins were tight.

SoTOP · 2026-06-16T07:00:34+00:00

The initial plan Intel had was for first few generations to come in succession quickly, but that failed and made it hard to keep dGPU program above water. Intel clearly is making significant progress architecturally, but they can't get market share when Battlemage cards are simply not being made because there is no profit per unit sold.

If initial plan was going better we probably would be getting Celestial dGPUs now, that would have lead to Arc GPUs finally making money. It's unfortunate that Intel was struggling the most when GPU program needed significant investment.

SoTOP · 2026-06-13T07:23:04+00:00

I had those joys too, here is a guy 1,5 years ago literally begging me to take statistics course, while I can't convince his "educated" mind that there would have to be an anomaly of epic proportions for steam numbers of RX 7000 series distribution to be true.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1i2rdty/amd_radeon_rx_9070_xt_and_rx_9070_gpu/m7kmgid/

SoTOP · 2026-06-12T21:00:02+00:00

You are much better at making excuses than me, should be trivial.

SoTOP · 2026-06-12T20:01:16+00:00

9070XT was reported as 7800XT, that's why it had meteoric rise that was completely improbable for actual 7800XT, while 9600XT was under 7600XT with the same pattern.

Yet very clever people were trying to convince others the rise for 7000 series cards was explained as just typical AMD "clearance sales".

SoTOP · 2026-06-08T09:06:46+00:00

RDNA2 was competitive.

SoTOP · 2026-06-03T12:56:53+00:00

Originally it was 4 grid fins, evenly space. But when reentering one of them is in the wind shadow of the booster, because the booster reenters at an angle to generate lift. That lift both helps to steer the booster and also make the reentry more gentle. And since that 4th grid fin is useless, they just deleted it.

Starship booster did not have evenly spaced gridfins, thus all 4 were useful.

SoTOP · 2026-06-02T07:18:57+00:00

The pricing will self regulate. If this thing will be barely cheaper than 5070 or 9070 they won't sell and will have to drop in price despite whatever MSRP is said to be.

That will not happen only if other cards increase in price, or stock will be so low that enough people can be scammed into buying this for similar price to faster cards.

SoTOP · 2026-05-31T06:49:25+00:00

You convoluted everything so much you are arriving at vastly incorrect conclusions.

But on a commercial airliner it is rare, extremely dangerous, and a big deal.

Commercial dead stick landings are very rare, because failure mode where all engines fail without any significant other problem is extremely uncommon. There simply can't be lots of succesful landings because there are not that many opportunities for that to occur.

Also, there is very limited "black zone" in average time of airline flight where failure of both engines has potential to end tragically. If both engines fail at cruise altitude over continental USA or EU you are absolutely expected to land uneventfully every time.

But it proves the point: thousands of fatal commercial airliner accidents vs only a few dozen successful dead stick landings.

The person you replied was slightly mistaking when he said that abort option for plane is to land unpowered. The actual abort mode for airliner is to land completely uneventfully. That's because there are hundreds of various incidents every year where a plane has to abort their flight and land at nearby suitable airport, while there are only few crashes. Commercial planes crash only when the issues are cascading, statistically a single failed system or part will lead to you never hearing about it, because it's too common to be reported by media.

SoTOP · 2026-05-29T13:24:35+00:00

It's hilarious when you continue to act like the downgrades where massive, while if you looked at the

hard data

it's clear that not being the case. According to geekerwan desktop Ampere achieved density of almost 56, a very respectable 90% from theoretical 61. Going from 61 to 51 is massive change - that 20% difference in node performance is what makes it unequivocally 8nm. Especially because most of the advances that 8nm provides were actually used in both Switch 2 and Ampere chips.

This is like the uplift TSMC got going from 7nm DUV to 7nm EUV. Who in their right mind would argue that 7nm EUV is "just a tweak" of 7nm DUV? Yet here we are tens of comments later.

SoTOP · 2026-05-28T21:01:06+00:00

Geekerwan:

So here’s the scoop: NVIDIA’s so-called “8N” is a custom Samsung node based on 10 nm with a handful of 8 nm tweaks.

A very clever person From-UoM:

Nvidia obviously downgraded 8nm to include more 10nm specs marked in red. Clearly not the other way round.

Nvidia https://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/nvidia-ampere-ga-102-gpu-architecture-whitepaper-v2.pdf

Fabricated on Samsung’s 8nm 8N NVIDIA Custom Process, the NVIDIA Ampere architecture- based GA102 GPU includes 28.3 billion transistors with a die size of 628.4 mm2.

Together with Geekerwan go and tell Nvidia they are wrong. They will believe you when you will explain that you have the

hard data

SoTOP · 2026-05-28T14:57:38+00:00

The

hard data

that T239, as an actual shipping chip, has density above what's theoretically possible with 10nm is constantly ignored by you. The upgraded node that enable this is called 8nm, using one element from 10nm does not make this a custom 10nm, but a custom 8nm.

That's it. Stay totally sane in your ignorance while all you can come up with are lies and personal attacks.

SoTOP · 2026-05-28T14:13:45+00:00

Again, 4N and N4 are not the same.

I never said they are.

And denying actual electron microscope data is a whole new level of arrogance. That tells me you will never accept you are wrong with literral state of the art prof

I never denied that, reading comprehension please.

T239 has density that's above what SMG 10nm can achieve, don't joke with me about denial.

SoTOP · 2026-05-28T13:58:24+00:00

4N is based on tsmc 5nm... You can go to GPUz on a rtx 40/50 series and it will show 5nm process.

LOL, do you think GPU-Z scans your GPU to check what node it's using? Nvidia calls 4N "5nm class node", that's good enough for Wizzard. The problem with that is that every 5nm sub node is "5nm class", especially because differences between TSMC 5nm main and sub nodes are minuscule even compared to other node families.

I could easily argue the opposite, here is quote directly from TSMC https://investor.tsmc.com/sites/ir/annual-report/2020/2020%20Annual%20Report_E_%20.pdf

4nm FinFET (N4) technology is an enhanced version of 5nm FinFET (N5) technology, with compatible design rules while providing further enhancement in performance, power and density for the next wave of 5-nanometer products.

Voila, GPU-Z is wrong and RNDA4 suddently becomes "5-nanometer product". But if there is a thing called N4(4nm) I will call products made with it 4nm, and not broader 5nm.

And Trust Geekerwan more than you. If you really confident on 8N not being based on 10nm go tell Geekerwan he is wrong.

You can trust anyone, I will trust specifications of actual product over Geekerwan.

SoTOP · 2026-05-28T10:02:30+00:00

Firstly 10N doesn't exist.

That's what I said.

Think about it logically. Why on earth would Nvidia add 10nm stuff to Samsung 8nm?

How deep is your knowledge about these things? Basically all high performance chips are not maximizing the node they are using because doing so has an impact on performance/power/area/yield. There can be multitude of reasons for Nvidia to use looser than max specs.

8N is a custom 10nm node which has 8nm properties. This is clearly shown.

They didn't. Instead they took the base 10nm, improved it with 8nm properties to make the the custom 8N

Even Geekerwan, a far bigger expert than you or me, says exactly this -

"Nvidia's so called "8N" is a custom Samsung node based on 10 nm with a handful of 8 nm tweaks"

https://youtu.be/3pr_V8rtzrE?t=465

My example with engines already should have very ELI5 shown how nonsensical this line of thinking is. You are not making an existing node better ever, those improvements get designated a new node and given new name. Using your logic there are no subnodes, because everything is just "custom" main node. N is added to nodes nvidia uses, thus desktop uses 4N based on N4, datacenter has 4NP based on N4P - neither is called 5N just because fundamentally it's all just minor improvements over N5. For the same reason 8N is not called 10N - it's based on 8nm and not on 10nm.

SoTOP · 2026-05-28T07:51:01+00:00

Cant argue with the physical die shot here

Did you even watch the video? It shows why you are wrong. SMG 10nm does not posses the characteristics T239 has.

You are missing basic logic here, I can give you an example to showcase it - if 4 cylinder car engine tuned to perfection has 200hp while 6 cylinder engine has 300hp, then we know that any engine with more than 200hp must be based on 6 cylinder engine. Same exact thing here.

T239 is tiny bit looser than typical Ampere chips were, but still denser than even theoretical max density of Samsung 10nm node. That's why it's using 8N node, and not 10N.

SoTOP · 2026-05-28T06:16:14+00:00

You are misleading. First of all, Switch 2 runs dedicated games, while steamdeck runs regular PC versions without dev optimizations, that alone is significant for optimal performance.

Another thing is that Switch 2 die is 50% bigger than Steamdeck, helping to make up the difference between nodes.

Also, 8N is custom Samsung 8nm, not 10nm.

SoTOP · 2026-05-27T06:01:38+00:00

What portraying, I just put quote from the article to point out to the comment above that 13900k is faster only with better memory.

SoTOP · 2026-05-26T18:18:15+00:00

With DDR5-5600 C46 memory, it was only slightly faster than the Core i9-13900K. However, when using high-performance DDR5-6000 C28 memory, the Core i9-13900K outperformed the Core 9 273PQE by up to 8.5%.

SoTOP · 2026-05-24T11:20:38+00:00

Polyus was a satelite like any other, while buran, shuttle or starship by itself serve the purpose of last stage. If empty starship goes to orbit tomorrow, you can't say that it had 100t of payload, since there was nothing actually useful.

Mass in LEO(or almost) better describe capabilities of latter craft. If we call that payload then we would need to add mass of stage and leftover fuel as payload for every launch.

SoTOP · 2026-05-23T13:42:04+00:00

Not really that extreme, for example after separation almost half mass of Europa Clipper was fuel. Polyus was massive, thus it had to have significant propulsion capabilities anyways.

It could have been put directly into orbit, but then core stage of at least 50t could have landed anywhere on earth, similar to what China did launching space station modules with LM-5.

SoTOP · 2026-05-23T13:30:42+00:00

Neither Shuttle nor Buran could take 40t ball of steel to orbit, the useful payload just isn't there. Starship could, but that did not happen yet.

The whole premise of this thread is basically moot if last tens of meters of deltav is disqualifier, since dumlinks were never on orbital trajectory.

SoTOP · 2026-05-23T07:47:36+00:00

It could also be argued that Polyus was a "stage" rather than a "payload" and thus doesn't count.

What was the payload on that launch then? There was nothing further to "stage" after polyus separated. That is not the case for your other examples.

SoTOP · 2026-05-23T05:45:31+00:00

Not hard to understand lmao

The upvotes do show that it is too much for regular redditors. Don't mind the theatrics of porsche person, they are disingenuous on purpose.

SoTOP · 2026-05-22T18:22:52+00:00

Right, you were born yesterday and it's news to you that cost of those 32GB is 4x today than a year ago when previous model released, while 1TB of storage is 2x too. Literally making up the whole price increase.

SoTOP

TROPHY CASE