Comment by bigyabai
5 hours ago
> and unified memory. PCs are long overdue for adopting this change
Why? Desktop PCs, especially gaming PCs, have nothing to gain and everything to lose by oversubscribing system memory with GPU workloads. The memory bus typically isn't fast enough anyways, and a modern PCIe x16 can easily handle the bandwidth of a gigantic GPU. The only advantage to unifying everything is latency, which isn't relevant at any framerate under 1000hz.
> when you have both integrated and custom, it'd have made sense to integrate them.
Sometimes, sometimes not. AMD's mobile packaging technology is not world-class like Apple and Nvidia's is. Valve had the experience with the Steam Deck to make the call if a mobile architecture was the right choice, and they decided against it.
Valve doesn't have to make a Mac. This is a gaming device, it's designed accordingly.
All consoles have been using a single integrated chip since the last generation. The memory bandwidth a CPU uses is much less than GPU. Let's say a CPU does 50 GB/s peak while the GPU does 200+
But why is it overdue? It's easy to put the performance profile of a console on an SOC, it's impossible to integrate many desktop GPUs into the same form factor. Pull up a unified benchmark like the OpenCL Geekbench, it makes this obvious. The most powerful SOCs, like the M3 Ultra, pull over 250w to get worse scores than a 4080 laptop dGPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
How are SOCs going to replace full-fat ATX cards when they can't even beat the thermally-throttled version? The SOC isn't even more energy-efficient, here.