The Performance & Power Improvement Of Steam Deck OLED's 6nm APU

The Steam Deck OLED has been on the test bench the past few weeks at Phoronix. The HDR OLED display of the updated Steam Deck handheld game console is gorgeous and was very impressed by it. On a technical level the battery life improvements are significant and one of the items I was most curious about were the power/performance implications in moving from the 7nm Van Gogh APU to a 6nm die shrink version of it while retaining the Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 integrated graphics. Here's a look at the performance and CPU power consumption between the Steam Deck LCD and Steam Deck OLED models not only for gaming but other Linux workloads too.

As my first set of Steam Deck OLED benchmarks, I was curious to stress the new hardware with a focus on looking at the power/performance difference of the 6nm AMD APU compared to the prior 7nm Van Gogh APU of the original Steam Deck (LCD). The 6nm APU is effectively just a die shrink with the new Steam Deck will having four Zen 4 cores (8 threads), clocking up to 3.5GHz, 8 RDNA 2 CUs clocking up to 1.6GHz, and an APU power rating of 4 to 15 Watts.

While running a wide range of workloads -- both gaming as well as other CPU/system workloads for being curious over the 6nm power/performance, I was also monitoring the SoC power consumption using the exposed PowerCap/RAPL interface. I would have also monitored the SoC temperature too for differences but it wasn't loaded on SteamOS

Both Steam Deck models were with 16GB of RAM and running the latest SteamOS rolling as of testing.