Twitter leaker _rogame posted a screenshot of system information, referencing an unreleased device & mentioning an AMD Mero APU inside. The product in question is the Magic Leap Demophon, which is said to be an augmented reality headset to be released in the future.
What is the AMD Mero series? We have to look back over the previous two years of leaks and information to piece the puzzle together to answer this. Here is the tweet from _rogame that appeared at the end of last month:
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Likely for their AR headset pic.twitter.com/VHgbIBx1VF
Another well-known Twitter leaker, KOMACHI_ENSAKA, posted a screenshot taken from a document of device IDs and tabulated functions about AMD APU models. Since that post, it has been removed from Twitter. The tweet posted mentioned various AMD codenames used for varying series of CPUs and GPUs. The names mentioned were Renoir, Van Gogh, and Mero. Ensaka insisted at that time that Mero and Van Gogh were identical. After further review, some minor differences between the two series set them far enough apart to be slightly different.
Valve's Steam Deck handheld console uses a customized AMD Van Gogh APU to power the system. The unique APU is a Zen 2 series CPU cluster, offering four cores across eight threads and processes between 2.4 to 3.5 GHz. The graphics card onboard is an RDNA2-based GPU that offers eight CUs, or Compute Units, processing at about 1.0 to 1.6 GHz.
Comparing the two devices, AMD has redesigned their Van Gogh chip again, and this chip is now considered AMD Mero. The unreleased Magic Leap Demophon headset needs a proper GPU to power the three-dimensional renderings that appear in the user's field of vision. The AMD Mero will be more power-efficient, portable, and comfortable for users to digest.
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The AMD Mero APU was sampled with a BaseMark GPU test on the Android 10 OS using OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan APIs. According to BaseMark PowerBoard ranking, The test proved that the APU is faster than the AMD Renoir APU, which utilizes an AMD Ryzen 4000 with Vega iGPU, running at its standard resolution of 720×920 pixels.
The Magic Leap Demophon does not have a release date or pricing details. We will continue to follow this story as more information develops.
Source: Basemark, @_rogame, @KOMACHI_ENSAKA
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