Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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Unless the price is ridiculously low, corporations are not buying thousands of anything without a support contract. Next day repairs/exchanges and priority support are a must when dealing with hardware at scale, and Valve is not going to offer that.
Dell/Lenovo/HP are already more expensive than consumer-grade hardware from Best Buy unless you are a very large customer. Companies pay for reliability, warranty and support.
It happened to the Playstation, though not for use as workstations usually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
Although Valve apparently already takes anti-scalping measures with the Steam Deck, so maybe it could work out in that way (as in, each steam account gets a limited number of purchases, TOS against trying to bypass that limit, etc).
Those PlayStation supercomputers were wild. I don't think it's analogous to the various bits of Steam hardware coming out though, since Valve sells directly through Steam. You can't order anything by the pallet.
The other thing to consider is that the PS3 was used for clustered computing primarily because of the Cell processor. I have no recollection of why the cell processor performed better on certain types of problems. PS3 wasn't being used for Excel spreadsheets, it was used for niche academic use and that one Air Force supercomputer. The Steam hardware though uses pretty standard hardware, AMD processor and Radeon graphics card.
Considering the added friction of buying through Steam, i doubt it will have same draw.