It’s CES season, and that usually means an abundance of hardware news, leaks, and broken embargoes. This morning, hours before AMD’s press conference, some presentation slides slipped out early that outlined AMD’s Ryzen Z2 processors. These are APUs targeted at the burgeoning gaming handheld space, and the images in the slide led many websites to hastily report that AMD stealth-announced a Steam Deck 2 powered by Ryzen Z2 processors.
A presentation slide that might suggest a new Steam Deck is powered by AMD’s Ryzen Z2 processor … [+]
The slide in question, above, shows photos of the current PC handheld frontrunners — Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and Legion Go — next to phrases like “more OEMs adding designs in market” and “explosive forecasted growth.” Coupled with the knowledge of Lenovo’s CES event featuring Valve and AMD as special guests, it led prominent leaker VideoCardz to incorrectly report that AMD “confirmed” the Ryzen Z2 being used in upcoming systems from ASUS, Lenovo, and Valve.
The original article’s text has been lightly edited to omit the mention of Valve. But many prominent outlets had already reported various versions of “AMD Announces Ryzen Z2 Processors For Steam Deck” articles.
However, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais, who has long been the unofficial spokesperson for all things Steam Deck and Proton, swiftly shot down the rumor via his Bluesky account.
There’s no question Valve is working on a Steam Deck 2, but we know from previous statements that the Steam platform owner rejects the idea of yearly hardware refreshes.
Steam Deck 2? When It’s Ready
A few months ago, Valve’s Lawrence Yang confirmed as much to Eurogamer: “We really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck, but it is something that we’re excited about, and we’re working on,” Yang said, arguing that incremental upgrades aren’t fair to its customers.
In my eyes, the Steam Deck still represents the flagship user experience for handheld PC gaming, but it’s beginning to show its age as the list of unplayable games continues to grow. Lenovo, MSI, and Asus already have products slightly more powerful than Steam Deck, with even beefier upgrades no doubt waiting in the wings.
So, while Valve still holds the crown for best software experience thanks to SteamOS, it needs to launch a Steam Deck 2 to retain its dominance beyond 2025. Unless Valve is content to let the Steam Deck brand die and settle for OEMs licensing SteamOS and build their own handhelds. And there’s no way Valve is sending Steam Deck to the graveyard after everything it has invested into the brand.
What is Valve waiting for, then? Probably another groundbreaking, battery-sipping semi-custom APU design in partnership with AMD. Of course, we can’t rule out that such a design wouldn’t use the same Zen and RDNA technology in use by the Ryzen Z2 lineup; it just wouldn’t be called Z2.
I’ll keep my eye on all things Steam Deck and handheld gaming as CES kicks off this week.