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Van Gogh, AMD’s Steam Deck APU
- williamDafoe 4y agoSounds like steam deck is the worst of all worlds. I am told people buy consoles because they just wanna play and not worry about tweaks or game config. Game will still work 5y later on a console, but not on a PC. Looks like steam deck implements NONE OF THET!
- Gordonjcp 4y agoIt's actually an excellent chip but I find I have frequent audio problems, with the left channel dropping out in stereo mixes.
- CaliforniaKarl 4y agoI've never seen that before, though my Steam Deck audio setup is a bit weird: HDMI to HDMI audio splitter, with audio going out to S/PDIF and video going to an HDMI-to-DP converter.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoThe joke dies if you explain it...
- thih9 4y ago> AMD APU, marketing term from AMD for a microprocessor that includes a CPU and a GPU within a single chip From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APU
- CaliforniaKarl 4y agoI'm wondering, is the WiFi chip actually an RTL8822CE? I did some of my own exploration 1-2 months ago, and I identified it as an RTL8821CE combo WiFi/Bluetooth chip. It took a bit of time, because the chip uses PCIe for the WiFi part and USB for the Bluetooth part, so the different functions appear on different busses and tools.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoI hope Valve will release an updated SteamDeck with a new SoC featuring Zen4 instead of Zen2 and RDNA3 vs RDNA2, all on the smaller 4nm process, as the current SoC is kind of holding it back a bit. That would definitely boost performance and battery life. Wouldn't mind it if came with a price increase, as it would still be cheaper than a single high end GPU alone.
- pdpi 4y agoThey would mind the price. All of the videos at the time of announcement highlighted how hard they tried to keep the price down.
- prmoustache 4y ago> I hope Valve will release an updated SteamDeck with a new SoC featuring Zen4 instead of Zen2 and RDNA3 vs RDNA2, all on the smaller 4nm process, as the current SoC is kind of holding it back a bit. > >That would definitely boost performance and battery life. Wouldn't mind it if came with a price increase, as it would still be cheaper than a single high end GPU alone. That would be a terribly unwise decision from Valve. If there is one sure thing about video games console systems, is that stability of the product is more important than outright performances. That is what makes them so successful over gaming PCs. If Nintendo or Sony was releasing a new model every 2 years and people couldn't run new games on the old releases, only a fraction of those users, the very hardcore gamers, would follow the upgrade path and most users would just leave the platforms. The best thing that can happen is the Steamdeck stays the same for 5 to 10 years and video game developers continue making sure their games run well on it.
- kibwen 4y agoI agree that it's too soon for a CPU refresh for the Steam Deck, but I disagree with the idea of thinking of it as a console. It's a PC, and PC game developers are already required to support a vast, unfathomable array of configurations far beyond what an upgraded Steam Deck would require.
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- treesciencebot 4y agoI wonder whether the upcoming APUs will feature 3D cache. Assuming it server pretty well in a gaming scenario (and more so when the CPU and GPU is sharing the same memory bandwith) it should be a pretty clear win. And since these chips are meant to be drawing less power than the general purpose ones, I guess having another layer of 3D v-cache would not constitute as big of a problem as it does on the desktop platform.
- Out_of_Characte 4y agoThese chips are meant to be cost competitive, not performant. There might be more incentive to add gddr6 bandwith rather than limited 3D cache. Theres also HBM memory as another alternative that would function better to reduce power draw compared to gddr.
- mastax 4y agoWas Van Gogh developed custom for Valve? I think I remember talk about Van Gogh from before the Steam Deck was announced, and at that time it wasn't presented as a custom chip but delayed and troubled cheap gaming APU project. Silicon bug workarounds could explain some of the strange behavior seen here. If Van Gogh wasn't a custom project and Valve just happened to have the perfect use case for it that would be serindipitous.
- shaunsingh0207 4y agoIt was developed for general laptop use, and valve just happened to have the perfect use case for it.
- TheEvilBlight 4y agoFrom 2021 or so: https://m.hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/147700-details-amds-low-power-low-cost-van-gogh-apu-emerge/ https://m.hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/147700-details-amds-low-po... https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-7nm-van-gogh-apus-w-rdna-2-graphics-reportedly-canceled-6nm-rembrandt-w-zen-3rdna-2-in-h2-2021/amp/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-7nm-van-gogh-apus-w-rdna-2...
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- neogodless 4y agoI believe the exact configuration of the Van Gogh APU is custom designed for Valve. There are very similar APUs but this exact chip is not used in laptops.
- shaunsingh0207 4y agoIt was originally with microsoft, to go in a surface device, then that fell through and the steam deck picked it up. Not general use persay, but microsoft's general use
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
- initplus 4y agoThe missing L3 cache is interesting, I can only assume that it's another sacrifice made for power optimisation. Maybe their perf metrics showed disabling L3 provided a worthwhile power/perf tradeoff?
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoMaybe cost too. Custom 7nm silicone aint cheap and the steamdeck is quite an affordable product considering Vlave don't have access to the same economies of scale that Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft do.
- mschuster91 4y agoMaybe AMD took on a bit of the costs for developing the Steam Deck APU so that they can sell it to other users as well like NVIDIA did with the Tegra chip.
- goosedragons 4y agoAFAIK nothing else uses the Steam Deck APU despite there being several PC handheld manufacturers. All the others go with standard laptop chips for better or worse. Although I wonder how much exclusivity you get anyways with how remarkably similar the PS4/Xbox One and PS5/XSX designs are.
- reisse 4y ago> considering Vlave don't have access to the same economies of scale that Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft do. Don't underestimate them, Valve is similar in revenue to Microsoft Gaming Division, so I think they can afford selling hardware at a loss.
- initplus 4y agoThe L3 cache appears again in Windows, so it's clearly there physically on the die. But under the default performance tuning of the deck seems like it's not really being used. Possibly they are turning L3 off/down at runtime?
- sosodev 4y agoWow I’m glad somebody is finally quantifying why the steam deck has terrible CPU performance. I thought it might be the tiny cache. Many older games struggle to hit a consistent 60 FPS due to CPU limitations. With some testing you can usually figure out which options are mostly bottlenecked by the CPU. There are some games, like Fallout 3, that will chug down towards 30 FPS in busy areas regardless of settings :/
- 0xDEF 4y agoThat is disappointing to hear. I was actually planning to buy the Steam Deck to play 2010-2016 era action RPGs.
- samuraijack 4y agoYou should give it a shot. HN can be too negative at times. At least the YouTube vids seem to indicate that the deck can handle the games of that era just fine.
- clamchowder 4y ago(author of the article here) Agreed. I'm just commenting on the hardware architecture. The deck is a pretty competent gaming device, given its ultraportable form factor and tight power constraints. You can find that out on any number of sites that have reviewed the Steam Deck from gaming experience perspective, so I didn't think it was necessary rehash that.
- edrxty 4y agoDon't let everyone get you down, I have one and it's extremely performant, even with games from the past few years. It'll work totally fine for stuff from that era.
- jnovek 4y agoI’ve been playing through my ARPG backlog on Steam Deck. Is there a particular game you’re curious about?
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- eek2121 4y ago[flagged]
- daguava 4y agoIf you're gonna make these claims we need a few links - not calling you a liar but you got nothing here atm...
- rektide 4y agoPlease enlighten us, good sir. What is one error? These folks seem to have ultra-legit reviews with deeply in-depth testing & comparison. A long track record of it, with many folks commenting in on HN to declare how great these kinds of reviews are to see, how numbers based. You havent made a single claim amyone could refute, at this point. But you've pretty vaguely claimed a huge raft of issues. Are any of these things we can make real or discuss? Or should we just take it on faith, trust you, that this pretty well reputed site is bs?
- MindSpunk 4y agoYou mean this article, https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/10/27/why-you-cant-trust-cpuid/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/10/27/why-you-cant-trust-cpu..., where they fake a 10 core Zen 4 part as an example of how you can quite easily fake CPU benchmark reports and why you should be careful what information you trust? Where they're completely transparent about what they did, why they did it and how they did it to raise awareness of how this stuff can be faked? Yeah, okay.
- djmips 4y agoThe called the APU 'Aerith' in this 2021 article... https://www.theverge.com/22779252/steam-deck-things-we-learned-from-valve-developer-summit https://www.theverge.com/22779252/steam-deck-things-we-learn... I guess it's the same APU... Hard to track these things.
- Narishma 4y ago> There’s no cut down FPU like on the PS5, for example. Anyone know more about this?
- sgtnoodle 4y agoA typical Zen 2 CPU has 320 floating point "register files". It's been a long time since I studied architecture, but the idea is that the instruction set's floating point registers are mapped to one of those files at any given time. The operating system can change that mapping during a context switch. That allows the OS to quickly jump between contexts without having to save and restore all the floating point registers to RAM. The PS5's CPU has fewer floating point register files. Given that it's a game console, there's probably fewer threads running, so it was just unnecessary die area.
- davidcme 4y agoThe physical registers are not managed by the operating system. Instead they are used for out-of order speculation using register renaming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_renaming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_renaming What you talk about is not used in the X86 ISA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_window If PS5 code uses fewer floating point operations than conventional desktop CPUs, there are fewer physical floating point registers needed for an equally sized speculation window.
- kevingadd 4y agoIt would make sense if PS5 games don't have as much of a need to do floating point work on the CPU, since they have shared-memory access to a high-performance GPU and can do pretty much anything they want with it. AFAIK AMD has had asynchronous GPU compute support in their hardware for a long time, so I'm sure the chip in the PS5 has it.
- Narishma 4y agoEven the PS4 supported async compute in its GPU.
- Plagman 4y agoThe L3 finding on Linux is likely caused by the C3 entry cache flush, which goes away in our upcoming 6.1 kernel. It doesn't affect most game workloads but can be a real performance problem in some specific cases. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAJZ5v0jWX=H=aZ25PzHdH05bRJvtYbGHfyTgH_68k4kfYkZc5A@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAJZ5v0jWX=H=aZ25PzHdH05bRJvtYb... The way the benchmark works likely triggers it consistently.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoCool. Can I ask why does valve/steamdeck use Gamescope and not Wayland? To my very limited understanding they both target to do more or less the same thing, and I think we have enough fragmentation in the Linux ecosystem as it is, so to my uninitiated brain it would have seemed logical to put al that development effort in improving Wayland for the steamdeck instead of building another compositor. Thanks in advance.
- goosedragons 4y agoWayland is just a protocol. GNOME and KDE both use their own Wayland compositors for example. Gamescope as a gaming focused Wayland compositor probably has more emphasis on things like latency than other compositors.
- airminer 4y agoWayland is not a compositor. It is a protocol for (compositing) display servers to use. And gamescope is a Wayland display server.
- justinclift 4y agoIs that the right url? It seems to be a conversation where Deepak Sharma talks about needing to resubmit a patch (and a follow up patch), rather than be the submitted patches themselves.
- sosodev 4y agoFor those who don’t know, plagman is a Valve employee and the creator (?) of gamescope. Cool to see you here. Gamescope is awesome.
- ariwilson 4y agoI think they made good tradeoffs with the Steam deck. It's a portable console and games are typically GPU constrained not CPU constrained.
- steponlego 4y ago>under Windows >with Windows 11 >in Windows We’ve got a serious case of Redmonditis over at Chips and Cheese, LOL.
- pdpi 4y agoWell, the Steam Deck is meant as a dedicated gaming PC, and explicitly supports replacing the OS, so Windows performance is eminently relevant. Also, every single reference to Windows is in the context of testing whether the performance issues they're seeing are OS or hardware related, which is exactly the sort of analysis work I'd like to see more of.
- steponlego 4y agoIt’s explicitly a Linux gaming PC. Do you see people benchmarking BeOS on their Surface?
- pdpi 4y agoNo, I don't see people benchmarking BeOS on a Surface. Then again, I've never heard anybody say "well, if this whole Windows thing doesn't work out, I'll install Be on my Surface". At any rate, this article isn't about the Steam Deck's performance, it's about Van Gogh specifically, and how it relates to other pieces of Zen 2 hardware. Testing with both Linux and Windows is useful. There's a comment elsewhere in this discussion by a Valve engineer saying that one of the issues the author saw is due to an ACPI handling issue in Linux. That's the sort of thing you catch by testing with multiple OSes.
- clamchowder 4y ago(author here) full disclosure, I work at Microsoft. On Azure though, not on Windows. But using Windows, as another commentator pointed out, was done because my latency test gave very weird results from SteamOS and needed more investigation. I also used Windows to test the iGPU because Nemes's Vulkan test ran into problems under SteamOS.
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- soganess 4y agoWhat software did the author use to measure / test memory throughput? Those DDR5 numbers are truly terrible. I've seen 1866hz quad rank ddr3 perform substantially better.