this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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I don't think there are any 'cheap' Strix Halo chips out there, Valve probably got a massive discount (relatively) by using previous gen. laptop parts
They say it's a custom design, so surely they could've custom-designed it to be unified rather than discrete if they wanted. I guess maybe they were trying to make sure it would only be bought by gamers by deliberately making it less versatile for AI?
Custom in this case doesn't really need to carry any weight either, it could be a simple voltage bump, clock bump, laser cutting cores etc. and they would still call it custom.
It's not a "from the ground up" custom chip. Unified still requires a significant amount of chip area per die, especially if they want to have a relatively beefy GPU (somewhere below Radeon 8060S, but above Radeon 780M).
I would imagine this gives the best perf./buck from Valve's POV, without costing an arm and a leg
Even compared to having two entirely separate memory controllers, one for the CPU and one for the GPU?
I would assume the total area is larger for the separate CPU+GPU die when compared a single unified chip, sure. But the cost per millimeter doesn't necessarily scale linearly either (larger chip, lower yields), so it might be cheaper to buy CPU+GPU rather than the unified chip even though the total area is larger.
For reference, TechPowerUp lists:
RX 7600M: 204 mm² @ TSMC 6 nm
Strix Halo: 308 mm² @ TSMC 4 nm
Not sure what kind of area one could expect for the CPU alone (without the integrated GPU) for this kind of process