News Steam Deck Hands-On: PC Gaming in My Hands

[jeremyj_83]

When compared with the base models, maybe. Remember though that games for these consoles were geared for their strengths - the Steam Deck will run "generic" PC games.
Zen 2 has triple the IPC Jaguar had - but that's including SMP. All in all, at similar clock speeds, a quad core Zen 2 chip would have twice the performance of a similarly clocked 8-core Jaguar processor.
On the Steam deck, the CPU's power budget is very low - so the processor will run all cores at half the clock at best that a PS4 or XBONE would have. Single threads will peak as high though.
But the CPU isn't the part that gets the biggest load : the GPU part is the one that will have to push the pixels. And while RDNA2 is a big upgrade over GCN 1.1 / 2nd gen, offering 40% more performance per compute unit per MHz, the Steam Desk offers only 8 CUs to the PS4's 18; granted, it can boost to twice the PS4's APU frequency, but you can't count on it happening all the time; base frequency is only 200 MHz higher than the PS4's.
And that's the base PS4 model - the one that couldn't run Cyberpunk at all. If we look at the PS4 Pro, that used 36 GCN 1.3 CUs at 911 MHz, it's more than twice as fast as the base model.

Single threaded performance of the Zen 2 4800U (more closely related to Steam Deck TDP) compared to the original PS4 Jaguar is between 5 & 10x higher depending on software. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2699?vs=2633
Bring that to the PS4 Pro Jaguar and the difference is only between 4 & 8 times higher. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2688?vs=2633
Both of those fit into your IPC statement but that fails to include the added frequency. Basically 1 core of the Zen 2 has the performance of 4 cores of PS4 Pro Jaguar. The Steam Deck with a 4c/8t Zen 2 CPU will have CPU performance vastly higher than any previous gen console. It will still lag behind the current gen consoles due to lower TDP & core count.