I’m wondering how much profit a 3nm APU can make compared to current 7nm based APUs.

Not much at the moment… You see the 7840u on 4nm… The problem is that the Steam Deck is very efficient at 10W or less. Laptop CPUs like the 7840u/Z1Extreme achieve higher fps, but only from 15W, and quickly become a bottleneck due to memory speeds, among other things.

Ironically, if you want a decent successor, you’ll almost have to build an iGPU with built-in cache to try and reduce those memory bottlenecks a bit. And what we’ve seen in the desktop GPU market is that these benefits only start with more than 32MB of cache. That’s a lot of extra silicone you have to build in, and silicone costs money.

You’d have to build a custom 4nm design to get these benefits at 10W or less, and that costs extra money.

The new vapor surface will be much more expensive, because 4nm is new. The 7nm deck was already several years old when the SD1 was released.

There is little benefit to Valve in creating a new group and that is not their goal. You should not forget that the SD card is nothing more than a device to sell more games via Steam. And now with more “competitors” like Ally, the new Lenovo Go, etc., well, they do the work and Valve collects the profits through Steam. All that, as long as these guys don’t start out like in the streaming market, with their own exclusive games/market segmentation.

For me the solution is simpler if you want AAA quality…

You have a gaming PC that constantly sleeps. You then use moonlight or other “cloud” streaming on that computer (and activate remotely).

Lo and behold, you can play any game on your deck, laptop, or TV, the battery life is three times longer, and the noise is zero. Aka stupid clients like design. And if you really want to be a joker, use dGPU sharing, which allows multiple people to play games on the same dGPU. As is known, many people use one “server” for gaming. What about putting the computer back into sleep mode? Well, just set your sleep timeout to 3 minutes and voila. Gaming on demand, much cheaper, faster, lower latency than GeforceNow etc. SD cards etc also have a very long battery life.