Rare Steam Deck prototype sells for $2k with unreleased AMD Picasso APU
A few years have passed since Pierre-Loup Griffais shared photos and even a short video of Steam Deck prototypes. Now, one of these has sold on eBay in the US for an eye-watering $2,000. Please note that while the eBay listing suggests that the auction's final price was $2,999.99, a Best Offer of $2,000 was accepted.
Based on the photos shown in the listing, it appears that Valve finalised this prototype in February 2020, roughly two years before retail units were released. Officially, the Steam Deck comes with two APU options; one codenamed Aerith that ships in LCD models and another codenamed Sephiroth that Valve uses in OLED variants. However, Engineering Sample 34 reaffirms that Valve was previously working with an AMD 'Picasso' APU that likely featured Zen CPU cores and Vega (GCN 5.0) iGPU cores.
According to Pierre-Loup Griffais, this Picasso APU provided 'about half' the GPU power of Aerith, which leverages an RDNA 2-based iGPU with 8 Compute Units (CUs). By contrast, newer APUs like the Ryzen Z1 Extreme found in the Asus ROG Ally (curr. $599.99 on Amazon) offer 12 CUs from AMD's later RDNA 3 architecture. In other words, this prototype would have been left far behind by now had it ever made it to market as a consumer device.
It turns out that Valve was developing the Steam Deck with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage at that time too. By contrast, all retail Steam Deck units ship with 16 GB of RAM, with 64 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB of storage offered across LCD and OLED variants combined. Ultimately, it remains to be seen where 'Engineering Sample 34' will end up and whether we will see it again. Hopefully, the prototype will make another public appearance at a later date.
Source(s)
eBay via r/SteamDeck
