idk who that guy is but I couldn’t think of how to word the title, sorry
︀︀• Custom AMD Zen 4 CPU
︀︀• 6 cores / 12 threads
︀︀• RDNA 3 GPU
︀︀• 28 Compute Units
︀︀• 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
︀︀• 16GB DDR5 RAM
︀︀• 512GB or 2TB NVMe SSD
︀︀• SteamOS
︀︀• Wi-Fi 6E
︀︀• Bluetooth 5.3
︀︀• Gigabit Ethernet
︀︀• HDMI 2.0 + DisplayPort 1.4
︀︀• microSD expansion
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
Even compared to having two entirely separate memory controllers, one for the CPU and one for the GPU?
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