There is an unknown area
Valve has named the best Steam games of 2023. There's Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy and Starfield
The Steam Deck handheld gaming console is based on an AMD APU codenamed Aerith, which is part of the Van Gogh line. And today we have the opportunity to look at this processor in a new way.
Famous enthusiast and photographer Fritzchens Fritz published macro photographs of this APU, including under a microscope, which allows you to see the various processor clusters.
In addition, there is a photo with captions that allows you to take a closer look at the different blocks of the APU. You can see that the CPU and GPU do not take up much space: 12.4% and 10.9% of the total area. And there is an unallocated area on the crystal — its purpose is unknown, but it occupies 13.7% of the total area. True, there is an assumption about its essence.
It lies in the fact that the same APU is probably used in the Magic Leap 2 AR mixed reality headset. The latter is known to have a 14-core CVPE processor for computer vision. Probably the same unknown block — this is the 14-core CVPE processor.
This is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the updated Sephiroth APU, which is used in the Steam Deck OLED, is known to have exactly the same configuration as the original Aerith APU. At the same time, Sephiroth will switch to a 6 nm process technology versus Aerith’s 7 nm. With this transition, the crystal area should have become 18% smaller, but in fact it is 20% smaller. Perhaps AMD removed some of the blocks unnecessary for the Valve console from the new hybrid processor.