Valve Says A Next-gen Steam Deck 2 Still Isn't Possible, Two Years...

There just aren't any chips good enough and probably won't be until 2027.

Way back in November 2023, Valve said that there was no suitable silicon available to enable a next-gen Steam Deck. In the wake of the company's latest hardware trifecta, announced yesterday, Valve is saying exactly the same thing. In short, the kind of chips Valve would need to make a true Steam Deck 2 still aren't available and probably won't be until 2027.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Back in 2023, Steam Deck hardware specialist Yazan Aldehayyat said, "I think for us to make a second version, we will be able to have a substantial performance improvement while sticking to a similar kind of power range and weight to battery life. And that's not going to happen next year or the year after that. It's probably going to be more than that."

Two years on, Valve is still happy to say it plans a new second-gen Deck. But essentially, the same problem remains.

"We're not interested in getting to a point where it's 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there's no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck," Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais said to IGN at the Valve hardware launch event.

All of this does rather beg the question of what would constitute a chip good enough for a next-gen Steam Deck. Certainly, part of the problem is that AMD, which supplies the APU for both the original Steam Deck and the Steam Deck OLED update, has actually been pretty conservative with its APU roadmap. At least it has when it comes to APU that could reasonably be used in the likes of a Steam Deck.

AMD's current top truly mobile APU is Strix Point. The problem is that it's a chip built on TSMC N4 silicon. And that silicon node is getting on now. It's really a variant of TSMC's N5 node. And the very first N5-based chips went on sale over five years ago.

It's also worth noting that AMD's mighty Strix Halo APU isn't suitable for a next-gen Deck, despite the fact that it's been crammed into at least one handheld PC. It's very powerful, but it almost certainly wouldn't meet Valve's battery life expectations.

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Source: PC Gamer