Comment on Alleged Steam Machine specs according to Chris Mizo
SavvyBeardedFish@reddthat.com 15 hours agoI don’t think there are any ‘cheap’ Strix Halo chips out there, Valve probably got a massive discount (relatively) by using previous gen. laptop parts
grue@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
They say it’s a custom design, so surely they could’ve custom-designed it to be unified rather than discrete if they wanted. I guess maybe they were trying to make sure it would only be bought by gamers by deliberately making it less versatile for AI?
SavvyBeardedFish@reddthat.com 13 hours ago
Custom in this case doesn’t really need to carry any weight either, it could be a simple voltage bump, clock bump, laser cutting cores etc. and they would still call it custom.
It’s not a “from the ground up” custom chip. Unified still requires a significant amount of chip area per die, especially if they want to have a relatively beefy GPU (somewhere below Radeon 8060S, but above Radeon 780M).
I would imagine this gives the best perf./buck from Valve’s POV, without costing an arm and a leg
grue@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Even compared to having two entirely separate memory controllers, one for the CPU and one for the GPU?
SavvyBeardedFish@reddthat.com 11 hours ago
I would assume the total area is larger for the separate CPU+GPU die when compared a single unified chip, sure. But the cost per millimeter doesn’t necessarily scale linearly either (larger chip, lower yields), so it might be cheaper to buy CPU+GPU rather than the unified chip even though the total area is larger.
For reference, TechPowerUp lists:
RX 7600M: 204 mm² @ TSMC 6 nm Strix Halo: 308 mm² @ TSMC 4 nm
Not sure what kind of area one could expect for the CPU alone (without the integrated GPU) for this kind of process