AMD suggests a Steam Deck revision might be coming soon

The Steam Deck! It sure is neat, isn’t it? But what about a potential Steam Deck 2? If you haven’t yet splurged on an upgraded OLED model, a hot-off-the-press announcement coming from VideoCardz suggests a new Steam Deck revision might be coming soon. Heck, maybe even a Steam Deck 2.

More specifically, VideoCardz has just pushed out a series of articles announcing and/or discussing cutting-edge AMD tech and hardware, citing the company itself as its primary source. This tracks with VideoCardz’ established track record, where it’s often the earliest source for hardware announcements and similar items. Amidst news about the Radeon RX 9070 and its exclusive FSR4 upscaling tech, VideoCardz has also announced the AMD Ryzen Z2 chip trio, which will supposedly be available on a Valve device of some sort.

Is Steam Deck 2 already coming?

This announcement could mean a few different things for the Z2 Extreme APU, in a practical sense:

• Steam Deck 2 is coming
• Steam Deck revision (of some sort) with Z2 Extreme is coming
• Valve’s about to announce some new Deck-adjacent hardware (a home box, VR headset, etc.)

Obviously, we’ve got no way of telling which of these options Z2 might suggest, but the hardware’s performance envelope might help. As per the announcement, there will be three variants of the new APU: Z2 Extreme, Z2, and Z2 Go. Z2 Go, for one, is going to be a Lenovo Legion Go S exclusive, and it serves as the budget option of the lineup. This leaves Z2 Extreme and Z2 as the possible options for the new Steam Deck, and I’m not convinced we’re looking at an actual Steam Deck 2 just yet.

As per VideoCardz’ article, Z2 is supposed to be roughly equivalent to the existing Ryzen 7 8840U APU, which features the Radeon 780M graphics processor. A fully-powered 780M is a smidge faster than Nvidia GTX 1650, which doesn’t sound like the kind of generational performance leap Valve is waiting for.

Steam Deck 2 is definitely being developed, but the device’s designer, Lawrence Yang, has been clear about what it needs: “We’re not going to do a bump every year,” he said in an interview with Reviews.org Australia. “So 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.”

Now, Z2 Extreme is going to be faster than the regular Z2, but it’s not clear by how much. And given that Yang’s interview was published in October of 2024, I find it hard to believe he’d make these claims if Valve was mere months away from announcing the Steam Deck 2. That’s without going into the nitty-gritty of Z2 Extreme’s efficacy at super-low wattages that the Deck’s current APU excels at.

That being said, AMD’s new Z2 chips are definitely making their way into some type of Valve hardware. A Steam Deck Pro that would be more focused on delivering higher-grade AAA gaming at the cost of a higher power draw seems like an obvious candidate. More information on Z2 and Valve’s handling of it is bound to drop soon, so stay tuned.

Update: No, a new Z2 Steam Deck revision isn’t being developed

It did not take long at all for Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais to dispel information coming from AMD and VideoCardz. Griffais has stated in no uncertain terms that there will be no Steam Deck running on the Z2 or Z2 Extreme chips at all. His guess is that AMD was trying to say that these chips are supposed to be used on products such as the Steam Deck, though it certainly sounded more concrete than that.

My guess remains that Valve is going to leverage Z2 in some way, shape, or form. Be that the long-rumored Deckard headset or the hypothetical return of the Steam Machines, we just don’t know. With that, you can rest easy if you recently purchased an OLED model!