Custom Steam Deck APU from AMD exposed in special die evaluation

Hardware photographer Fritzchens Fritz has partnered with YouTuber High Yield for an in-depth study the 7nm Van Gogh APU found in the LCD version of Valve's Steam Deck hand held recreation console.

The custom APU from AMD includes a four-middle / eight-thread Zen 2 chip, an RDNA 2-based totally GPU with eight compute units, and a 128-bit LPDDR5 memory interface. The evaluation indicates that the CPU consumes just 12.Four percentage of the entire die length even as the GPU makes up best 10.9 percentage of the silicon vicinity.

Combined, the CPU and GPU make up much less than 1 / 4 of the chip. What's the relaxation of the silicon used for?

As High Yield notes, things like I/O, render lower back ends, cache, and controllers populate other regions but there are nonetheless some regions that are unaccounted for. High Yield said the mystery location money owed for kind of thirteen.7 percent of the entire chip, so what may want to they be?

The YouTuber believes Van Gogh is also used to power the Magic Leap 2 AR headset. That device features a 14-core computer imaginative and prescient processing engine with a max frequency of 2.4 GHz. He makes the argument that this thriller location is the aforementioned 14-middle processing engine for Magic Leap.

In principle, if the laptop vision processing engine hasn't been bodily disabled in the Steam Deck (as an example, through the use of a laser to reduce strains), it is probably viable to permit it using firmware or BIOS mods. The YouTuber admits he is unsure if it might also be beneficial for the reason that it is designed exclusively for Magic Leap hardware and software program but in that case, the console might be used as a transportable AI accelerator.

Valve's newer OLED Steam Deck is constructed the use of a smaller APU than the only inside the LCD version - approximately 20 percentage smaller. High Yield believes the newer chip has been redesigned to put off the computer imaginative and prescient processing cores, however further evaluation to verify that is pending.

The full image set may be determined on Fritz's Flickr web page, and the deeper technical evaluation is to be had on High Yield's YouTube channel.