While the most recent rumour of a Steam Console was complete junk, it did get me thinking on what Valve would need to do to make a Steam Console / Steam Machine actually successful.
I was thinking as a cost cutting measure. As long as performance is comparable to a moderate CPU GPU combination, it’s less silicone, interconnections, ram, and coolers and less likely to break during shipping / assembly. Like a gaming console.
Such a PC could still use sockets with upgradable APUs or CPUs, as well as PCI slots for dedicated gpus, retaining basic upgradability. A lot depends on the upcoming AMD APUs.
Cause now you are gonna have to balance the same work across less CPU power, you also now have to manage two GPUs, and switching between them, and hoping games run on the right GPU (which I bet you there will be many instances where they wont).
APUs are great for istuations where you cant have a dedicated GPU, like a handheld device, or a small formfactor device, where you can use the GPU part of the APU for media processing/playback and light gaming.
APUs are a waste of money if you including a dedicated GPU.
Imo, 4060ti performance in a 600 to 800 dollar box running a amd Apu with 16 to 32 gb of shared ram. That’s all they need.
why an APU when you have a GPU?
the only thing an APU brings in that situation is wasted hardware and less cores/threads than an equivalent cpu would have.
I was thinking as a cost cutting measure. As long as performance is comparable to a moderate CPU GPU combination, it’s less silicone, interconnections, ram, and coolers and less likely to break during shipping / assembly. Like a gaming console.
Such a PC could still use sockets with upgradable APUs or CPUs, as well as PCI slots for dedicated gpus, retaining basic upgradability. A lot depends on the upcoming AMD APUs.
Running an APU with a GPU isnt less complication.
its more complication.
Significantly more.
Cause now you are gonna have to balance the same work across less CPU power, you also now have to manage two GPUs, and switching between them, and hoping games run on the right GPU (which I bet you there will be many instances where they wont).
APUs are great for istuations where you cant have a dedicated GPU, like a handheld device, or a small formfactor device, where you can use the GPU part of the APU for media processing/playback and light gaming.
APUs are a waste of money if you including a dedicated GPU.