A Steam Deck 2, unlikely. AMD and Intel x86 chips are competitive with ARM chips in that 10-15w range. Battery life is great in laptops. They're competitive with Apple at the same power ranges. There's going to be performance overhead translating x86 to ARM along with compatibility issues as FEX is maturing. Deck 2 should be targeting as much performance in the up to 15w range as possible. CPU instruction translator goes against that

Deck 2 makes most sense to stick with AMD. AMD CPU+GPU. There's no real cost savings getting AMD to integrate in an ARM chip. Qualcomm GPU's have far worse drivers than AMD and unproven to be as hardware feature performance as AMD/Nvidia. Intel still sucks power with their Arc cards compared to AMD/Nvidia at the same performance range. Nvidia ARM+GPU I doubt provides any cost savings. PowerVR and Mali graphics have trash drivers and probably not feature competitive with AMD/Nvidia for PC expectations

Steam Deck lite down the line sure where an ARM Deck that is stronger than the AMD deck and cheaper/lighter/fanless or maintains the low price of the old deck because inflation. But that should be down the line for FEX to mature and be certain that the ARM hardware is strong enough to make the translation overhead a moot point for something that's supposed to match a gen 1 Deck

Maybe Windows and Linux consumer ARM really takes off and we start seeing games ship ARM binaries. Then eventually it'll make sense for the high end handheld to go ARM. FEX mature for the older games that never updated with an ARM binary