It's my understanding that the particular variant of Zen 2 that Microsoft and Sony are using already has a unified cache and since the Steam Deck will use the same architecture, I would assume it'll also be unified.

The reasoning for doing it this way is because the Xbox, Playstation and now Steamdeck are designed with much higher memory bandwidth then normal.

The Xbox X and Playstation 5 are a good point. Since they use Zen 2 + RDNA2 Valve could probably get their low power APU built very cheaply while a Zen 3 APU variant would have to be designed from scratch which would make development a bunch more expensive and maybe introduce years of delays with the current state of waiting time on the fabs.

I wonder if it's even the case they're buying the exact same cores as Microsoft and Sony just arranged a bit differently.

My assumption is that their reasoning is power draw related. The APU they designed for the Steam Deck is rated for less then half the power draw of the 5300G (4-15W vs 45-65W).

With a battery that only has 40WHr it wouldn't even last an hour with a 5300G so not sure how exciting that would be. With their current APU they can do 2-8 hours which is decent enough for a handheld.

The Steam Deck is designed with that exactly in mind however. They're using a relatively fast CPU and very fast memory (5,500MT/s) and compensate for the relatively slow GPU with the smaller screen.

I don't see any way they could design it even better for that purpose keeping the realities of power draw and heat dissipation in mind. Obviously it can't handle everything, it's not magic but it seems to me to be well designed for the purpose of playing PC games on a handheld.

Dual core vs quad core. Dual channel vs quad channel. 3 1.2ghz Vega cores vs 8 RDNA 2 1.6ghz cores.

Try again I suppose.

Still waiting on that cheaper equivalent spec machine, just saying.

Considering that no one has so far managed to provide an example of an equivalent spec machine to the Steam Deck that is cheaper, maybe it's not quite so easy to find as you seem to think.

According to benchmarks, the R4 4300G has almost the exact same single thread performance as my current desktop CPU (6700K).

While faster is always nicer, I've certainly not had any issues with any CPU bound games so far. CPU almost never causes a framerate issue, where you notice lack of CPU horsepower the most tend to be simulation speed, for instance a few hundred years into any Paradox Interactive game.

Goalpost was always better value then the Steam Deck since the accusation was that it's poor value.

I suppose that depends on if you think 10-20% better performance is 'a lot' in context. For mobile gaming being within 20% of a dedicated desktop is amazing and plenty good for purposes such as Kerbal Space Program.

Meanwhile if the deck tried to power a 1080P screen rather then 800P it would produce an unplayable slideshow for many games since that is a 100% increase in pixels.

Most games which are CPU limited are also single-threaded. So you're unlikely to get much more performance then a Ryzen 3 either way.

Where the steam deck will perform poorly compared to a high end desktop is in heavily multi-threaded applications but that is highly rare in the world of gaming.

While the Motile is certainly cheap, it's problematic for gaming since it's single channel memory where the Steam Deck is quad channel so I'm not convinced it makes for a good argument the Steam Deck is over-priced.

If anything the fact it's very similarly priced to the Steam Deck show that Valve is taking almost no or negative margin.

So you couldn't find one cheaper, how can you claim the steam deck is over priced for spec?

I genuinely don't believe you when you claim to have found a sub $400 laptop with upgradeable ram.

I'm confused as to why you think it is over-priced. Where can you find a Ryzen 3 with 16gb RAM cheaper then the steamdeck?