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Funny that AMD would design a bespoke chip for Magic Leap that sold a tiny number of units, and Valve would ride on their coattails for a game console that undoubtedly sold way more. I wonder how much Magic Leap paid AMD for this design? Guess that explains where some of their billions went.

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One possible explanation is that Magic Leap may have significantly overestimated how many chips they needed, and wondered if someone might buy excess inventory… or at least, might buy out their contract.

Consider the first Magic Leap headset. They thought it would do over 100,000 units. It only did 6,000. https://www.engadget.com/2019-12-06-magic-leap-6000-headsets...

I don’t know how the Leap 2 is doing. But in the above example, let’s say AMD wanted a minimum order of 100,000. If you were Magic Leap, you’re running to find a buyer - any buyer. You’re also going to cut the price for your batch as far as necessary to cover for possible increased production costs in the future. Even if you recover just half of your costs, it’s better than being forced to buy chips nobody wants that will quickly go stale.

Thinking about modern chips in terms of units and inventory isn't the best way to do it. Cutting-edge logic isn't quite priced like software, but it's close enough: the first unit costs $10m in R&D and NRE (Non-Recurring Expenses, like mask sets and test tooling) and then the second unit costs $1 or so.

My guess is that Magic Leap, a company infamous for spending profligately, paid for the NRE on this design, and then didn't buy very many of them or pay for exclusivity on it (or let any exclusivity go). AMD is notorious for shopping around designs they've already got ready to ship (probably related to sibling comment's observations about the console graphics market), and Valve runs lean despite not having to, and so this story adds up quite nicely. There may or may not have been some inventory lying around, but the NRE is usually the real story on these things. (It's also possible that the custom Magic Leap sections of this chip have terrible yield -- actually that wouldn't surprise me at all -- and so these were great candidates for die harvest. Which of course is also the sort of thing AMD loves to sell.)

Interesting, why would one part of a chip have significantly worse yield than another?

It's just where the tightest structures (physically, electrically, or timing-wise) are found. The AMD cores and uncore are, I'm guessing, fairly well tuned to the process by skilled people. The bolt-on stuff often isn't so well done, particularly if an end-client project manager or beancounter is driving the schedule. So it's almost certain to happen if the added stuff has very complex paths, and you wouldn't be going to the effort of adding silicon if you didn't need it to do something interesting....

So, no proof, but it wouldn't be any kind of surprise if this were part of the problem.

It's where the cutting-edge work is, or where the analogue engineering is, and as such is very dependent on your simulation work being good enough. Or the designers may have chosen to put less slack there for higher performance at the cost of yield - this is something of a "bet" on the production process, which can turn out well or badly. Or it's where the chip is hottest.

It seems smart to go by the only successful handheld strategy - Nintendo always shops around for the cheapest chip that can get the job done. Even if it’s many years old as long as it’s cheap , highly available and can run what they need

The difference is Nintendo builds their own killer apps exclusively for the hardware that they choose, so they can guarantee a good experience regardless of the performance level. Steam Deck doesn't have any native games. It's all games written for other platforms first and if the chip's performance doesn't meet a minimum bar then it just won't work.

Nit: it does have the valve on-boarding game for it, but that doesn’t really change your point.

Also Valve do some steamdeck optimizations for every game via their shared shader cache. Which enables it to run a lot smoother than competing portable x86 systems.

> Also Valve do some steamdeck optimizations for every game via their shared shader cache

Isn’t the only purpose of this skipping shader (re)compiling?

As far as I understood it, they did it because compiling shaders both takes long on a handheld device and time is at a premium for handheld players. They don’t want to wait eight minutes for a shader compile.

There’s two places where shader precompilation helps:

1. Load times if you’re compiling them on stage load

2. Dynamically on asset load during gameplay.

The latter is one of the most major causes of stuttering in PC games, and Valves solution can greatly make a game feel smoother as a result.

It's all games written for windows, but at this point valve bankrolls proton and wine development so heavily it might as well be an in-house product. Valve would like all games to be written for Linux (case in point: Steam machines) but the reality is that game devs are slow to adapt and desktop gaming is still largely done on PC.

With that in mind, proton _is_ the killer app.

Do you have any idea what the lead time on a project like this would be? Given the timing for a bad 2019 leading into the pandemic and widespread predictions of severe economic shrinkage, I’m wondering whether what we’re seeing is that they had a design in-flight but someone panicked that they were going to be far short of their minimum commitments a second time. In that case, both Magic Leap and AMD would’ve been pretty motivated to have someone commit to things like fab capacity and Valve’s earlier work at least makes the possibility of shipping in a couple years seem potentially possible.

If I remember right, I think Valve has implied that the steam deck arose out of prototypes for a wireless VR headset, so it could be possible there was some early collaboration to that effect, and Valve ended up taking a different path once they realized what the steam deck could be?

> the steam deck arose out of prototypes for a wireless VR headset

Do you have any source for this? I don't recall seeing this kind of info so far.

Not quite what they said, but this article talks about how lessons learned with the Steam Deck will inform future VR devices

https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-working-on-vr-steam-deckard-o...

It seems to similar to PS3 vs Xbox360 PowerPC story

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