To be doubly clear, if the title was not explicit enough, this announcement is not made by Valve. This company is called, "SteamBoy Machine team". If not a hoax, this is one of the many Steam Machines which are expected to come out of the SteamOS initiative. Rather than taking the platform to a desktop or home theater PC (HTPC) form-factor, this company wants to target the handheld PC gaming market.
Image Credit: SteamBoy Machine team via The Escapist
If it comes out, that is a clever use of SteamOS. I can see Big Picture Mode being just as useful on a small screen as it is on a TV, especially with its large font and controller navigation. The teasers suggest that it will use the haptic feedback-based touchpads which Valve are expected to base the Steam Controller on. It will also include a 5-inch touchscreen.
The Escapist got into contact with the team and received a few more specs:
- Quad-Core CPU (x86)
- 4GB RAM
- 32GB built-in storage
Even if this company does not make good on their expectations, companies will now be considering portable SteamOS devices. This is the sort of outside-the-box thinking that Valve was pushing for when they wanted to create an open platform. Each party will struggle to win in their personal goals, yet they can also rely on the crowd (other companies or individuals) to keep up in areas where they do not want an edge.
Philosophy aside, the company is targeting 2015 with a "Standard Edition" supporting WiFi and 3G. It would make sense to have a WiFi-only model, but who knows.
Nice concept but the internal
Nice concept but the internal storage is too small. They claim it will play most of steam games but steamos game is essentially a PC games. 10gb for a single game are pretty much common on Pc right now.
unless it is doing what
unless it is doing what steamOS machines will do and stream from another computer.
steam boxes wont Natively play most games, especially at launch. since steamOS is a version of linux (maybe unix either way not windows) it has to have another computer to run the game and you just stream it to your steam machine where you also have the input.
my guess, if it were a real thing, it would be doing that.
though you can just use the nvidia shield which will stream games too (if you have the graphics cards supported) but basically same principle
Steam OS is a Debian Linux
Steam OS is a Debian Linux based distro, so eventually it should show up on the timeline, it’s still in beta!
http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/12.10/gldt1210.svg
This is absolutely primarily
This is absolutely primarily a Stream-Machine. Why is everyone missing this?
Linux __DOES__ run games,
Linux __DOES__ run games, better than you think. They have drivers for GeForce, Radeon and Iris Pro, if I say it over-simplified. Phoronix took a benchmark on SteamOS against Windows 8.1. Basically no difference in performance.
As a matter of fact, PS4 is already doing production level gaming on FreeBSD. FreeBSD is not Linux, but gaming is not Windows-only anymore.
Yeah, as I was writing this
Yeah, as I was writing this up, I was immediately thinking that 32GB is way too small without game streaming. It will be okay for games like Papers, Please, but not much above that.
An maybe a SteamGraph Steam
An maybe a SteamGraph Steam OS graphics tablet, built to run some 3d mesh modeling software(Blender, just for 3d editing meshes, and node editor compositing), and Gimp. Windows based pro tablets cost too much. Steam OS is lightweight and being Debian based, with all that app-get ability, can be as fully functioning as any windows OS based devices. This device SteamBoy should have an SD slot at the least. And I am researching portable mini PC form factor devices with the ability to run a Mini Desktop APUs/CPUs in a powered down/low clock state on battery power, and can be clocked up/voltage raised up when plugged in, and run headlessly from a tablet. A Steam OS based tablet that was designed to be paired with a small portable mini desktop server, mac mini sized, would be great, having the ability to game stream to the/a tablet, and easily be carried in a laptop bag or back pack.
AMD should focus on creating an APU with a wide range of operating frequency/voltage ability, that also has power gateable GPU execution cores, CPU cores etc. an SOC/APU that can run like a mini desktop APU when plugged in, and a mobile APU when on battery power. A dual mode APU made for a portable mini PC device that was designed, out of the box, to be controlled by a tablet, and headlessly serve/game stream to the tablet, over gigabit WiFi.
I would love to know what the
I would love to know what the hardware is going to be its got to either be atom ,eww, or an ultra low power apu a kabini successor.
maybe jaguar APU
maybe jaguar APU
thats kabini…..
thats kabini…..