We've caught sight of a chip that supposedly might power the Steam Deck 2, which serves as a hint that Valve could already be working on its handheld sequel.

TechPowerUp spotted the development with an AMD 'Gainsborough' APU having been leaked via OpenBenchmarking. It's an engineering sample chip with 6-cores (12-threads) and a base clock of 2.4GHz – but what links this to Valve's next-gen handheld?

Well, it's tenuous, granted – so arm yourself with a pile of seasoning – but the word Gainsborough is the key here, as Valve has used codenames inspired by Final Fantasy VII for Steam Deck silicon before. Namely Aerith and Sephiroth, and Gainsborough is Aerith's surname, as well-known GPU leaker Kepler pointed out.

Seemingly this Gainsborough chip was paired with 24GB of system memory for testing, although that doesn't necessarily reflect a potential upgrade for the Steam Deck 2 in this regard – that's a shaky idea given the RAM crisis and how long it might last for. All this means is that this memory configuration is currently what AMD or Valve is trying out the chip with.

There are benchmark results here (of course, it's on a benchmarking site), and we get to see that this new AMD APU hits 3,508 points in Furmark at 1024 x 768 resolution. That's a bit faster than the Steam Deck which scores 3,323 (albeit at 1280 x 800).

If the benchmarking seems unimpressive, it's going by the raw numbers, but remember that this is very early testing with drivers which are still a long way from being knocked into shape.

Source link