A Discovery Inside the Steam Deck's APU (2024)

High-resolution die photos and teardown analysis reveal that the Van Gogh APU used in the Steam Deck LCD contains a large undocumented block - about 15% of the die - that houses 14 additional heterogeneous cores. The visible APU layout matches expected elements: a Zen 2 quad-core CPU with 512KB L2 per core and a shared ~4MB L3, memory controllers adjacent to the cores, and an RDNA 2 GPU split into four WGPs with multiple cache layers, ALU arrays, TMUs and ray-tracing units. Spec comparisons show strong alignment with the compute pack used in Magic Leap 2, which lists a 14-core computer vision processing engine and AMD RDNA2 GPU characteristics (Magic Leap’s max GPU clock ~1.1 GHz vs Steam Deck’s ~1.6 GHz; Steam Deck CPU clocks 2.4-3.5 GHz).

The key argument is that Valve initially used an off-the-shelf Van Gogh variant that retained Magic Leap-oriented CVIP cores, then moved to a much smaller APU for the OLED revision by removing those unused blocks rather than relying solely on a 7nm→6nm density benefit. That suggests AMD repurposed a low-volume custom design (possible NRE-driven or die-harvest scenario) for Valve’s first run, and Valve later commissioned a true Steam Deck-specific die to save area, power and cost. The finding implies future handheld revisions could be further customized for power and yield advantages.