this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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I have an original Deck and I love it! They didn't make it more powerful or anything like that so I feel no need to upgrade.
The special edition with the orange accents is sexy though!
No need to upgrade, but what about a second one...
I wish! 😢
They did make it more powerful. 6nm APU instead of 7nm. They definitely updated it.
Processing power wise it's almost exactly the same. The main appeal of the new APU is its increased power efficiency.
Its more efficient, not necessarily more powerful. The number of transistors hasnt change, and the only performance gain, if any, would be due to boost algorithms based on temps and curve.
We'll have to see. Usually transistor count isn't a valid measure of performance unless the chips have identical clock, IPC, and architecture. It's possible they made the same chip on two different lithographies with the same clocks, but it's pretty rare.
Hence boost clock changes. But in general. Die shrinks wont affect performamce much outside of boost clock behavior because of changes in temperature. Companies generally decide to maintain the standard clocks to normalize performamce, especially with gaming devices.
But... boost clocks often directly impact performance? And why only increase boost clocks when after a lithography switch they'd gain so much headroom? Seems a weird place to draw a line in the sand.
But all of this is speculation. What we do know is that RAM speeds are increased, and that will directly impact performance with or without CPU improvements.
7nm > 6nm isn't a night and day performance node change. thats the same node change as the PS5 had with its silent revision. smaller chips are affected even less as they are still contrained with power consumption targets where faster devices which have higher turbos don't.
The base steam deck can already get better sustained clocks if you upgrade its cooling options. that's more likely to affect performance more than just the single nm change in process.
Nintendo when it went from 20nm Tegra X1 to 16nm Tegra X1+ chose not to change clocks.
Single nm in this case is a 15% improvement. The number of nm isn't the important part.
And Valve isn't Nintendo. Their hardware strategies, developer strategies, and manufacturing strategies are wildly different and really shouldn't be directly compared
They told you the performance target is the same.
It would be silly to expect the performance to be meaningfully different.
its a 15% improvement, only if you use the same die size. a die shrink shrinks said design to a smaller one, so the end product is smaller. they do not add any more transistors to the die, which is the mistake you're making.
if theres a performance, its the increased memory speed and new cooling hardware. Valve has stated themselves that they don't expect many performance differences at all.
I do as well, but seeing a model with improved battery come out so quickly is a bit disappointing.