Comment on Alleged Steam Machine specs according to Chris Mizo
grue@lemmy.world 14 hours agoThey 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 12 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 11 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
grue@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Oh right, I forgot about that part.
I guess you could look up specs for a desktop Ryzen CPU that doesn’t have integrated graphics. Not sure which is the right one to pick, but I checked a few AM5 chips and they were all about 71 mm^2^ @ either 5 or 4 nm.
BTW, what actually is “Strix Halo” anyway? I’m confused about whether it’s what they’re calling all the latest-generation APUs, or just the high-end ones, or Asus co-branding, or what.
Are there not any lesser APUs (with smaller die size and higher yields) that aren’t “Strix Halo” but still have a similar architecture and decent gaming performance?