Hardware photographer FritzchensFritz teamed up with YouTuber HighYield to take an in-depth look at the 7nm VanGogh APU in the LCD version of Valve's SteamDeck handheld gaming console. This custom APU from AMD consists of a four-core/eight-thread Zen2 chip, an eight-compute unit GPU based on RDNA2, and a 128-bit LPDDR5 memory interface. Analysis shows that the CPU only accounts for 12.4% of the total chip size, while the GPU only accounts for 10.9% of the chip area.
The CPU and graphics processor combined account for less than a quarter of the chip area. What are the remaining silicon wafers used for?
As HighYield said, I/O, rendering backends, caches, controllers, etc. occupy other areas, but there are still some areas that are not counted. HighYield says the mysterious areas account for about 13.7% of the entire chip, so what could they be?
The YouTuber believes that VanGogh is also being used to provide computing power for the Magic Leap 2 AR headset. The device uses a 14-core visual processing engine with a maximum frequency of 2.4GHz. He believes that this mysterious area is the above-mentioned 14-core processing engine of Magic Leap.
Theoretically, if the computer vision processing engine is not physically disabled in SteamDeck (e.g. using laser cut traces), it would be possible to enable it via firmware or BIOS modifications. The YouTuber admitted that he's not yet sure if it will work, since it's designed for Magic Leap hardware and software, but if it does, the console could be used as a portable AI accelerator.
Valve's latest OLED SteamDeck uses a smaller APU than the LCD model, about 20% smaller. HighYield believes that the newer chips have been redesigned to remove the computer vision processing core, but this needs further analysis to confirm.
The complete set of images can be found on Fritz’s Flickr page:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/130561288@N04/albums/72177720313601115/with/53421199280
More in-depth technical analysis can be found on HighYield’s YouTube channel: