Quote from: Pix on February 19, 2024, 18:14:03There was definitely a reason Valve chose the particular combination of a conservatively clocked quad core Zen 2 and (specifically requested) RDNA 2 for their APU.
Apparently, the way it really went down is the SoC was originally built for MS for some Surface like device. Then they delayed and cancelled it. Later on Valve came along and AMD offered to give this chip at a discounted price as otherwise the SoC project would of been a complete waste of money and resources (designing semi custom silicon takes a ton of R&D).
Quote from: Pix on February 19, 2024, 18:14:03This hardware did very good at being "good enough" while offering excellent efficiency for their target use case, as evidenced by the fact that, especially when power limited, it has taken two (and a half) architectures to beat with how nicely it sat in the voltage and efficiency curve.
Well, Van Gogh was a power optimized chip built from ground up for ultra low power devices. Z1 Extreme is marketed for handhelds and according to AMD's own revenue earning it's counted under the sales of 'semi custom silicon division' but it's a lie. The Z1 Extreme is a 7840U. They basically shoved a laptop chip into a handheld, which is kind of mind boggling. I mean, no sheet, it'll have terrible battery life.
Another way it could be seen is, AMD's GPU division only gets serious and don't duck things up when big money console contracts are on the line. Notice the gens that are pretty good (e.g. Polaris, RDNA2) are all used in consoles too and the ones that aren't (e.g. RDNA1, RDNA3) are simply used for beta testing on the PCMR?
Rumor has it that both RDNA3.5 and 4 are gonna be lackluster as the next-gen consoles will be skipping those to be based on RDNA5, so AMD can't really afford to screw that up. But I guess we shall see.
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