Valve Corporation may be working on a brand new Steam Machine of its own that comes pre-installed with SteamOS.
An eagle-eyed enthusiast spotted a change in the Steam Deck kernel by a Valve employee, who is testing HDMI CEC functionality for new hardware. The device also appears to share at least some similarities with Google ChromeOS devices.
The source further mentioned that the unknown device appears to be under developed on a platform codenamed the “AMD Lilac.” As for whether this is the name of the SoC or simply refers to a development board that Valve is working on is unclear at this point. Of course, as is the case with any hardware prototype, it may end up getting replaced by another SoC during development.
According to Geekbench, CPU benchmark for the AMD Lilac (8540U) resulted in a score of 2550 for single core performance, and in the 9000s for multi-core performance. In comparison, the Steam Deck CPU benchmark is in the 1300-1400 range for single core and in the 4000s for multi-core performance. Meanwhile, the GPU benchmark for the AMD Lilac resulted in a score of 66807. In comparison, the Steam Deck GPU benchmark is within the mid-10000s to mid-20000s range. As per the source, the greatly improved performance suggests a TV box, as the 8540U at handheld TDPs would score much more competitively with the Steam Deck.
The above benchmarks and mention of HDMI CEC testing suggests that Valve may be working on a new Steam Machine or something similar that is meant to connect to a TV and not a handheld or VR headset. Only time will tell whether this is the case, however.
Recently, it was reported that the SteamDB tracking tool had found new Valve branding guidelines, including one for “Powered by SteamOS”. As per the guidelines, the logo indicates that a hardware device runs the SteamOS and boot into SteamOS upon powering on the device.
