Steam Deck 2: First details of Valve Fremont point to higher performance for new gaming handheld or console
In the last few days, there have been indications that SteamOS may soon be heading officially to Windows gaming handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally (curr. $422.95 on Amazon). Additionally, there have been fresh sightings of a Steam Controller 2 and controllers that Valve may release alongside its long-awaited Deckard VR headset.
Now, new evidence has emerged of what Brad Lynch and others believe is new SteamOS hardware. Specifically, a device codenamed 'Fremont' has been spotted in a recent change made to the Steam Deck kernel. Based on initial findings, Valve Fremont utilises the AMD Lilac platform, which appears linked to a version of AMD's Ryzen 5 8540U APU. Either way, one could reasonably expect Valve that is developing something based around Zen 4 CPU cores and AMD's RDNA 3 architecture, given the usage of Zen 2 and RDNA 2 in the Steam Deck's custom APU.
Although AMD has now moved onto Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5, the AMD Lilac achieves GPU OpenCL scores similar to that of the AMD Radeon RX 6600S. Thus, it should offer a healthy performance boost for a future Valve hardware release. However, there is nothing to say that Valve would utilise an off-the-shelf APU design this time around.
At any rate, references to HDMI CEC support have led many to suspect that Valve Fremont is a desktop machine of some kind. Conjuring images of the ill-fated Steam Machine project, Valve Fremont may well be at an early stage of development. As a result, the likes of The Phawx have not ruled out AMD Lilac being the chipset behind the long-rumoured Steam Deck 2 that supports a higher-performance docked mode like the Switch, rather than a pivot to a console-like device. Presumably, more details about what Fremont is and how Valve intends to position it are a way off from being revealed yet, though.
Source(s)
r/SteamDeck via @fanthedeck, Brad Lynch & The Phawx, Alexander Andrews & Unsplash - Image credits
