Microsoft’s Recent AI Push Could Be Bad News for Handheld Gaming PCs
Microsoft is all in on AI after a recent push for “AI PCs,” is a joint venture with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. One of the specs for the upcoming “AI PCs” lists Neural Processing Unit (NPU) performance of at least 45 TOPS. This could be bad news for Steam Deck and the gang. Here’s why.
A Focus on AI Tech Means Less Cache and Lower Gaming Performance
By far the most popular chips powering the current generation of handheld gaming PCs are AMD’s APUs, which combine a powerful mobile CPU with a potent integratedGPU, allowing these handheld devices to run the latest and greatest games.
The catch here is that every APU out there has to use a portion of system memory since it doesn’t have its own RAM. This is a massive bottleneck that prevents APUs from achieving the same performance as the kind of GPUs you'd find in a standard PC which are equipped with their own memory.
The result is that even the most powerful APUs out there, such as the Z1 Extreme found in the ASUS ROG Ally, have a sizably lower memory bandwidth compared to modern discrete GPUs, even the bottom-of-the-barrel models such as the AMD Radeon RX 6400. As an example, the maximum memory bandwidth of the ROG Ally is 51.20GB/s, while the RX 6400 has a maximum bandwidth of 128.0GB/s.
One of the solutions here is to equip future APUs with larger amounts of cache memory, allowing both the CPU and GPU to use this local, on-die memory instead of the system memory. This should satisfy the thirst for memory bandwidth and noticeably improve gaming performance.
Both X3D CPUs from AMD and recent graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD use a large cache, resulting in great benefits to gaming performance. Even on graphics cards, lots of lighting-fast cache memory can result in improved performance despite the GPU having access to speedy memory located on the graphics card’s PCB.
AMD had planned just that for their next-gen "Strix Point" and "Strix Halo" APUs, which would have resulted in substantial improvements in
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