While the most recent rumour of a Steam Console was complete junk, it did get me thinking on what Valve would need to do to make a Steam Console / Steam Machine actually successful.
I was thinking as a cost cutting measure. As long as performance is comparable to a moderate CPU GPU combination, it’s less silicone, interconnections, ram, and coolers and less likely to break during shipping / assembly. Like a gaming console.
Such a PC could still use sockets with upgradable APUs or CPUs, as well as PCI slots for dedicated gpus, retaining basic upgradability. A lot depends on the upcoming AMD APUs.
why an APU when you have a GPU?
the only thing an APU brings in that situation is wasted hardware and less cores/threads than an equivalent cpu would have.
I was thinking as a cost cutting measure. As long as performance is comparable to a moderate CPU GPU combination, it’s less silicone, interconnections, ram, and coolers and less likely to break during shipping / assembly. Like a gaming console.
Such a PC could still use sockets with upgradable APUs or CPUs, as well as PCI slots for dedicated gpus, retaining basic upgradability. A lot depends on the upcoming AMD APUs.