Dismantling the Steam Deck handheld: AMD Van Gogh custom SoC

by ddos · February 10, 2022

Since Valve released the Steam Deck handheld in July last year, it has attracted the interest of many players. After many bounces, Valve has recently confirmed that the shipment date of this Linux handheld is February 28, and players will have to wait for a while to get this handheld.

Steam Deck uses AMD’s APU codenamed Van Gogh, equipped with a 7-inch 1280 x 800 IPS screen, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory,

storage space is available in 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB versions, running customized Linux systems, etc., and pricing starts at $399. The custom APU is called “Aerith” and is manufactured using a 7nm process, the CPU based on Zen 2 architecture has 4 cores and 8 threads, the clock is between 2.4 GHz and 3.5 GHz, and the integrated RDNA 2 architecture GPU has 8 computing units, the clock is between 1.0 GHz and 1.6 GHz, and the power consumption of the whole SoC is between 4W and 15W. The GPU supports FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology, with FP32 performance of 1.6 TFLOPs, comparable to the Nvidia GeForce MX450 (1.67 TFLOPs).

In fact, Valve has already provided the Steam Deck development kit to developers since September last year, which belongs to the “engineering verification test version”, and the function is exactly the same as the officially listed version. Recently, Linus Tech Tips and Gamers Nexus who got the Steam Deck decided to try to disassemble the Steam Deck to see what the inside is like.

Valve once advised against dismantling the Steam Deck casually, and it turns out that this is not wrong, because the whole process is very complicated and requires very rich operating experience for the dismantling personnel. Previously, at the Steam Deck Development Live Stream event, Valve had briefly dismantled it to show its internal structure, but it had not completely disassembled and revealed the custom SoC. Compared with the engineering samples used in the previous official teardown, this final version of the Steam Deck has no design differences, except that the color of the PCB has changed from green to black.