Steam Deck 2 CPU and GPU specs purportedly revealed in sketchy leak ^↺

MSI has laid out an entire roadmap for its future handheld consoles well before the MSI Claw is due to hit shelves globally. Valve has done no such thing and continues to remain silent about its future iterations of the Steam Deck. A cryptic message posted on the Chinese tech forum Chiphell may have given us our first glimpse into what the next Steam Deck has in store.

It states the next Steam Deck ($555 on Amazon) will use a "6-cylinder fourth-generation gasoline engine" (machine translated). This could be referring to its CPU, which could be a 6-core model based on the Zen 4 architecture. Further down, it has been speculated that it could mirror Hawk Point's 4C (Zen 4) + 2c (Zen 4c) configuration. The poster further adds that it will use a 16 CU (8 WGP) GPU in conjunction with LPDDR5X 8,533 RAM without specifying the former's generation or the latter's capacity.

Lastly, the Steam Deck 2 may launch with a 900p OLED screen clocked at 90 Hz, but that could likely change in the future. It is slated for a Q3-Q4 2026 launch and will come with a significant price increase. Valve plans to carry forward its existing strategy and sell older Steam Deck variants at a discount once the new model is out.

While one can brush the above specs off as fiction, they make sense when looked at alongside the original Steam Deck. Despite Zen 3 being around for a while, Valve opted to stick with Zen 2 and RDNA 2. Therefore, it isn't outlandish to assume that Valve will use a Zen 4 CPU for its 2026-bound hardware instead of Zen 5, which will launch later this year. As far as the GPU is concerned, RDNA 4 seems like an ideal candidate, as it will undoubtedly bring improvements over already impressive RDNA 3-powered SKUs such as the Radeon 780M.