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

Outside of the graphics/gaming workloads, the CPU power consumption on the Steam Deck OLED was slightly lower in workloads like Blender.

While delivering similar performance, the Steam Deck OLED was achieving around a half Watt savings on the peak CPU power consumption across various workloads and on average 0.1~0.5 Watt savings.

It was fun to see the benefits of Valve transitioning the Steam Deck's APU from 7nm to 6nm and indeed quantifiable across not only games/graphics but also CPU/system workloads outside of the Steam Deck's intended focus. Paired with the 50 Whr battery on the Steam Deck OLED compared to 40 Whr with the Steam Deck LCD, mobile gamers can enjoy longer gaming sessions with the new Steam Deck revision. Valve rates the Steam Deck OLED as capable of sustaining 3 to 12 hours of gameplay compared to 2 to 8 hours of gameplay with the original model. Most incredible though with the Steam Deck OLED is the beautiful OLED 90Hz display... More thoughts on the Steam Deck OLED in a follow-up article with first wanting to get these APU performance/power benchmarks out of the way. Thanks to Valve for sending over the Steam Deck OLED model for review on Phoronix.