Thursday, July 15th 2021
Valve Steam Deck SoC Detailed: AMD Brings Zen2 and RDNA2 to the Table
Valve today announced its first big splash into the console market with Steam Deck, a device out to eat the Nintendo Switch's lunch. The announcement comes as yet another feather in AMD's cap for its semi-custom SoC business, benefiting from being the only company with an x86-64 CPU license and having a cutting-edge graphics hardware IP. Built on the 7 nm node at TSMC, the semi-custom chip at the heart of the Steam Deck is designed for extended gameplay on battery, and is a monolithic silicon that combines CPU, GPU, and core-logic.
The yet-unnamed semi-custom chip features a 4-core/8-thread CPU based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, with a nominal clock speed of 2.40 GHz, and up to 3.50 GHz boost. The CPU component offers an FP32 throughput of 448 GFLOP/s. The GPU is based on AMD's latest RDNA2 graphics architecture—the same one powering the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and Radeon RX 6900 XT—and is comprised of 8 RDNA2 compute units (512 stream processors). The GPU operates at an engine clock speed of 1.10 GHz to 1.60 GHz, with peak compute power of 1.6 TFLOP/s. The silicon uses a unified memory interface, and a cutting-edge LPDDR5 memory controller.
Steam Deck is endowed with 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory, running at 5500 MT/s data-rate. Storage interfaces include eMMC (1 GB/s per direction), PCI-Express Gen 3 x4 for NVMe-based storage (4 GB/s per direction), and microSDXC. The chip is designed to operate at configurable TDP of 4 W to 15 W. On battery, the console uses aggressive power management, running the CPU and GPU at tighter clock-speeds, lowering the TDP. When plugged in, the SoC gets to stretch its legs and sustain max boost frequencies better.
The yet-unnamed semi-custom chip features a 4-core/8-thread CPU based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, with a nominal clock speed of 2.40 GHz, and up to 3.50 GHz boost. The CPU component offers an FP32 throughput of 448 GFLOP/s. The GPU is based on AMD's latest RDNA2 graphics architecture—the same one powering the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and Radeon RX 6900 XT—and is comprised of 8 RDNA2 compute units (512 stream processors). The GPU operates at an engine clock speed of 1.10 GHz to 1.60 GHz, with peak compute power of 1.6 TFLOP/s. The silicon uses a unified memory interface, and a cutting-edge LPDDR5 memory controller.
59 Comments on Valve Steam Deck SoC Detailed: AMD Brings Zen2 and RDNA2 to the Table
www.deviantart.com/viralchecker/art/Stacked-Deck-804068688
Perfect AMD Radeon color scheme and all. Steam deck doesn't have the same ring to it.
Though, it would have been nice to see Steam taken down a peg if they did something as dumb as that.
m.imdb.com/title/tt3890160/mediaviewer/rm1840091393/
8 RDNA2 compute units in this vs 8 Vega CUs in Cezanne.
4 zen2 vs 8 zen3 cpu cores, which would fit in with the lower power & smaller die requirement.
I.e 8 cores 16 threads when docked and 4 cores 8 threads in mobile mode.
I think Steam is the vert few companies that might have the resources and know how to pull-off a decent fight.
www.newegg.com/p/0Z9-005J-00BA8?nm_mc=KNC-MSNSearch&cm_mmc=KNC-MSNSearch-_-Game+Cube+Video+Games-_-CAFELE-_-9SIAY4BEFB3324&source=region&Item=9SIAY4BEFB3324
I'm very interested in this.
How tone deaf can one be?
Oh, good luck when you get stickdrift and have to toss the entire unit.
I wished that this was Rembrandt based(Zen 3 and 12 RDNA CUs) but oh well, I guess that for the price, it's good. It would probably have been better for future proof and stuff like emulation, if we take the Aya Neo as an example, it wouldn't be able to do PS3 emulation well at all since lower clocks and lower core count(even if it has SMT/more threads).
In any case, the article mentioned that this will eat Nintendo Switch for lunch. From a hardware perspective, that is certainly so. But I would like to see if they can even sell anywhere as close to Nintendo Switch's sales number. This is not even an apple to apple comparison because the target market for Nintendo is certainly not the same as people who may buy this or a console like PS or Xbox.