STEAM DECK NEWS – Gabe Newell’s company has confirmed that despite AMD’s Ryzen Z2 lineup at CES, they haven’t jumped on the new hardware from the “reds”…

Recently, there have been rumors that AMD’s next-generation APUs could be in the pipeline for Valve, so the next-generation Steam Deck model could also get a hardware upgrade, as the currently available device (OLED or not) uses AMD’s Ryzen Z1 APU. However, Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of Valve’s designers, told Bluesky that the rumors are simply wrong.

Griffais stated that there is not and will not be (!?) a Z2 Steam Deck. For the APUs that were announced at CES 2025, AMD just wanted to show what the new chips could do in a handheld PC, and that’s why Valve has no such announcement. Therefore, it’s probably not really certain that the company wants to include the Ryzen Z2 (which is mostly a Z1 Extreme…) or the Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU in the next-gen Steam Deck.

All we know for sure is that the Ryzen Z2 APUs will be launched in the first quarter, so by the end of March we could have handheld PCs ready for gamers. In any case, the Z2 Extreme seems like a fair improvement over the previous generation chip, but it’s likely that Valve is waiting for its earlier claim to be true: the company wants a meaningful hardware upgrade, and only then will it make the switch.

In any case, the handheld PC market has been quite lively lately. The other day we wrote about Acer’s product, and it’s more like a brick in terms of size, because the 11″ display version is already quite large in terms of weight, but that’s not what Acer designed it for… but the fact that it’ll be three times the weight of the Switch isn’t all that different.

So when will Valve reveal the new Steam Deck?

Source: WCCFTech