Steam has hit the nail on the head once again with Gabe Newell at the helm in a strategy that has left everyone by the wayside and it is possible that no one can follow them thanks to the Steam Deck. But the company is not going to stop there, since it secretly had another coup planned: being able to play any game in your Steam library in your car and anywhere. How? With the help of Elon Musk, Tesla and a AMD SoCs very similar to the PS5 in power.
Sublime strategic move by Tesla, once again, that catches the entire automotive industry off guard and that surely boosts the company’s vehicle sales while pushing Steam and AMD to heights that we may not even be able to imagine today . Valve and AMD have been working side by side with Tesla and Elon Musk, where the famous millionaire and businessman has released some very surprising statements.
Tesla, Steam and AMD: a PS5 for your car?
We’re working through the general case of making Steam games work on a Tesla vs specific titles. Former is obviously where we should be long-term.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2022
Well, everything seems to indicate that the shots are going to go there. Elon Musk has commented that they are working on Steam working on their Teslas, at least and in the first instance with specific titles, but being specific with Cyberpunk. What if you could run Cyberpunk on a cyber track? Well, according to Musk, it will be so and this will also expand to the Model X and Model S in the first instance, but here comes the best, how is a car going to run a game in situ and not through Streaming? What power will it have and how will they do it? This is where AMD comes into the game with something that we have already discussed in the past.
Elon Musk will take advantage of an AMD SoC with RDNA 2 on Steam
Steam Deck is the door, AMD is the key, and Tesla is the hand that pushes it. Valve’s console uses an RDNA 2 iGPU and has its operating system and titles adapted to it, where the number of games is increasing and it seems that Elon Musk is going to make his move. There’s a new infotainment package from Tesla that will include a quad-core, eight-thread Zen+ CPU (rumored to come with Zen 2) (like the Steam Deck, curious isn’t it?) that would integrate a desktop Navi 23 chip .
Since Tesla is going to upgrade its screens to 17 inches with resolution of 2,200 x 1,300 pixels it will take a lot of power to run demanding games on a car. The rumors are focused on said Navi 23 chip trimmed for its balance, since it would go from 32 CU to 28 CU (Navi 23 XL?) which would leave us with a chip like the one mounted on the RX 6600.
This would leave us with 8.9 TFLOPS in FP32 at 2.5 GHz, but the performance of the AMD SoC for Tesla would go further reaching 2.8GHz. What does this imply? So an overall performance of 10 TFLOPSalmost traced to the one that PS5 currently has and practically identical to the one that Navi 23 XT has as a complete chip, all with a TDP of about 160 watts about.
But then why not use Navi 23 XT (RX 6600 XT custom) instead of Navi 23 XL as chip for Tesla? Probably because the XL version is cheaper to manufacture since it comes from being a chip that has not passed the AMD stress tests for all its CUs, so by raising its frequency you get the best of both worlds, lower price, same features, same consumption, possibly the same cooling system .
