The Steam Deck left us in February of next year and unfortunately we won’t be able to enjoy it yet, of course Valve is not enough to make us wait two more months, but it also gives us long teeth speaking of its excellent architecture based on AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 technologies thanks to its custom APU.
Aerith: Valve’s Steam Deck SoC
Through a 10-minute video presented by Chief Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat, Valve took a tour of the architecture of its Steam Deck where it revealed new details that were not known about its video game console.
First, we have that the APU or SoC is called Aerith by Valve, although it really is an AMD Van Gogh APU, but it is normal in this type of design for the supplier and the customer to give it two different codenames for the same hardware, so this detail does not not stop being a minor curiosity. Regardless of the different name, it seems to have some variation from AMD’s super low power APU.
The second detail concerns the clock speeds for which he reconfirmed those given during the first presentation of his Steam Deck. However, according to Aldehayyat, they did not embrace CPU Boost speeds because they want to have consistent performance all the time. . This statement causes us some confusion, since Valve gives minimum and maximum speeds in the specifications of the CPU and GPU of its console. The logic is to think that there are sets due to the fact that some are intended for low load tasks such as menu navigation or technically simpler games that do not require as much power and the others for gaming games. high caliber.
The third detail is in the organization of memory, we have 16 GB LPDDR5 in a bus from 128 bits
Storage format affects load times
We know that Valve will offer different models of the Steam Deck, the basic model with 64 GB eMMC and the more advanced models with an NVMe SSD and therefore faster. This makes many people wonder if the 64GB model with expansion capabilities via SD cards might not be limited in terms of data access speed. Well, in order to allay people’s fears about the base model of the console, they released a series of data on the boot and load times of games.
The results? As you can see in the graphic at the beginning of this section regarding loading a game from the NVMe SSD of the model of 512 GB do it 64 GB eMMC of the base model is an increase of 1.125 times and the SD card of 1.18 times. In terms of boot time, the base model will take 25% longer than models with NVMe SSDs.
We can’t wait to get our hands on the Steam Deck and test our extensive Steam catalog on it to test its portability.