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
I don’t think there are any ‘cheap’ Strix Halo chips out there, Valve probably got a massive discount (relatively) by using previous gen. laptop parts
They say it’s a custom design, so surely they could’ve custom-designed it to be unified rather than discrete if they wanted. I guess maybe they were trying to make sure it would only be bought by gamers by deliberately making it less versatile for AI?
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