It's a lot of dollars for that level of performance. If they want this steambox thing to take off, $900 for an AMD APU just seems like a bad way to go.
"The Piston" is not Valve's Steambox though. I believe I remember hearing that Valve worked with this company on a few things with the Piston, but the Steambox is something entirely different.
Valve has bought into the company and promoted the Piston at their booth during CES. I'll buy that this isn't the "Steambox" proper. What's going to be different about the Steambox? We hear stuff like biometric sensing in controllers from Gabe...and that there will be varrieties of it...but if they want to be competitive in console graphics they'll need at least something like A10 performance, especially without the benefits of standardization. This is stuff for another thread, maybe, but what is even the point of a steambox? A cheap computer with steam pre-installed to get console people to PC games? Are people that already have decent computers even supposed to care?
The Steambox will be running a custom linux distro as its OS and be designed more of a console with standard PC parts.
