Cool but I wish it had a single big APU chip like the consoles and Strix Halo - and unified memory. PCs are long overdue for adopting this change, and the only reason it makes sense to keep the separate is to make graphics cards swappable.

Considering how big GPU silicon is, when you have both integrated and custom, it'd have made sense to integrate them.

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Plasmoid2000ad 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm thinking they considered this strongly, since that's what they did with the steam deck.

We don't know price yet, but if it's like the deck they'll be trying to keep it as cheap as possible. The deck supposedly was so off-the-shelf that it re-used a design for another AMD customer, leftover elements and all - https://boilingsteam.com/an-in-depth-look-at-the-steam-deck-...

Unless Valve took a big risky bet, the Steam deck is going to be again re-using existing hardware and excess hardware. I'm presuming there are leftover unsold Zen 4 and RDNA 3 dies - and nothing competitive that AMD could offer from Valves perspective, at least when they locked the design some months ago.

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eigenspace 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What they're using here is still mostly off the shelf silicon with some tweaks. If they got enough volume, they probably could go for an all integrated APU with unified memory that could keep the GPU fed, but that'd be a very expensive and new thing to develop.

I hope that if this is a success, they'll have the numbers to justify a Strix-Halo like APU with a smaller CPU but keeping the big GPU for the next generation of the device.

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dvtkrlbs 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem with those Halo chips are they are really expensive. Steam is aiming for the masses so above 1k for this device is a no-go.

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bigyabai 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> and unified memory. PCs are long overdue for adopting this change

Why? Desktop PCs, especially gaming PCs, have nothing to gain and everything to lose by oversubscribing system memory with GPU workloads. The memory bus typically isn't fast enough anyways, and a modern PCIe x16 can easily handle the bandwidth of a gigantic GPU. The only advantage to unifying everything is latency, which isn't relevant at any framerate under 1000hz.

> when you have both integrated and custom, it'd have made sense to integrate them.

Sometimes, sometimes not. AMD's mobile packaging technology is not world-class like Apple and Nvidia's is. Valve had the experience with the Steam Deck to make the call if a mobile architecture was the right choice, and they decided against it.

Valve doesn't have to make a Mac. This is a gaming device, it's designed accordingly.

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torginus 10 hours ago | parent [-]

All consoles have been using a single integrated chip since the last generation. The memory bandwidth a CPU uses is much less than GPU. Let's say a CPU does 50 GB/s peak while the GPU does 200+

	▲	bigyabai 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But why is it overdue? It's easy to put the performance profile of a console on an SOC, it's impossible to integrate many desktop GPUs into the same form factor. Pull up a unified benchmark like the OpenCL Geekbench, it makes this obvious. The most powerful SOCs, like the M3 Ultra, pull over 250w to get worse scores than a 4080 laptop dGPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks How are SOCs going to replace full-fat ATX cards when they can't even beat the thermally-throttled version? The SOC isn't even more energy-efficient, here.