Valve Corporation will begin working on a Steam Deck successor, dubbed the Steam Deck 2, though it is at least 2 to 3 years away from release.
Speaking during an interview with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Valve Corporation’s Product Designer, Lawrence Yang, talked about the launch of the Steam Deck OLED, and how it boasts all the features the development team wished it could have incorporated in the original version.
Yang also revealed that him and his team will now work on the Steam Deck successor, which will feature a “next-generation” power upgrade. However, he added that the Steam Deck 2 is at least two to three years from release. Schreier noted that, unlike with several of its past experiments, including Steam Machines and the Steam Controller, Valve appears to be committed to its handheld device in the long run.
The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming computer created by Valve and launched on February 25, 2022. It runs on Valve’s Linux distribution SteamOS, featuring the Steam storefront. SteamOS incorporates Valve’s Proton compatibility layer, enabling the use of Windows applications and games. Besides its handheld mode, the Steam Deck can be connected to a TV or monitor via a docking station, functioning like a desktop computer or home video game console. In desktop mode, users can install third-party Linux-based applications.
The handheld PC features a custom AMD APU, known as Aerith, based on the Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures. Aerith’s CPU is a four-core/eight-thread unit, and the GPU utilizes eight compute units with an estimated total performance of 1.6 TFLOPS. Both the CPU and GPU have variable timing frequencies, with the CPU ranging from 2.4 to 3.5 GHz and the GPU from 1.0 to 1.6 GHz, depending on the current processor requirements. Valve has stated that the CPU’s performance is comparable to Ryzen 3000 desktop processors, and the GPU’s performance is similar to the Radeon RX 6000 series. The Steam Deck is equipped with 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM in a quad-channel configuration, offering a total bandwidth of 88 GB/s.
