YouTuber High Yield and photographer Fritzchens Fritz have released a in-depth analysis of the 7nm Van Gogh APU found within the original Steam Deck, showcasing shots with annotated components. The study revealed the layout of the Van Gogh APU and how significant each component is, and clarified some hardware that seemingly served no purpose for the Steam Deck.
Codenamed Aerith by Valve, Van Gogh is an APU designed by AMD and manufactured in TSMC’s 7nm process. It contains four Zen 2 cores and eight RDNA 2 compute units (CUs), which are relatively weak compared to conventional Ryzen APUs for laptops. However, it has four unique memory channels instead of the usual two, enabling greater bandwidth. Van Gogh is not available to any company as a semi-custom design, hence its almost exclusive use in the Steam Deck.
The die-shot analysis confirmed these basic specifications and revealed how significant each component inside the APU was. Van Gogh measures 162 mm², with the LPDDR5 memory buses using about 9%, the CPU cores taking up 12%, and the GPU cores consuming 11%. It is worth noting that the GPU cores themselves represent only about half of the entire graphics processor. Various functions and combined GPU components are approximately the same size as the eight RDNA 2 CUs.
Combined with the memory controller and other GPU-related components, these parts make up only half of Van Gogh’s total size. The I/O components for USB ports and display capability are contained in the other half, but the images show many remaining unaccounted for areas.
According to High Yield, 13% of the Van Gogh APU space is dedicated to a component he initially couldn’t identify, but believes to be the computer vision processing engine (CVPE) used inside the Magic Leap 2 AR headset. The Magic Leap 2 is confirmed to use the AMD Mero APU, which has four Zen 2 cores and eight RDNA 2 CUs like Van Gogh. Initially considered a variant of Van Gogh, High Yield claims that Van Gogh and Mero are the same chip used in the Steam Deck and the Magic Leap 2.
A vital piece of evidence for this claim is that the 6nm Sephiroth APU used in the Steam Deck OLED is much smaller than the 7nm Aerith chip. Although TSMC’s 6nm has 18% denser logic transistors than the 7nm, the 20% smaller size of Sephiroth implies that something was removed to reduce the size of the new APU.
High Yield further speculates that original Steam Decks may be able to utilize the CVPE hardware that is currently unused. However, this depends on whether AMD manually disables the CVPE using a laser or if it is simply turned off by firmware. It is also not clear to what extent modders would be able to utilize the CVPE, as it is exclusively used in Magic Leap hardware and software.