Steam Deck 2 is in the Works, But is At Least 2 or 3 Years Away - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 09 November 2023 / 5,137 Views
Valve today announced the Steam Deck OLED, a new variant of the Steam Deck that comes with an OLED screen, which will launch on November 16 for $549 for the 512 GB model and $649 for the 1TB model.
Steam Deck product designer Lawrence Yang speaking with Bloomberg revealed the team will work on a Steam Deck 2 that will feature a "next-generation" power upgrade. It is at least two or three years away from release.
"A lot of folks at the company are excited about this product," said Yang. "We are very invested in the Steam Deck."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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I'm glad it's so far away. I'd prefer it to be on a different cycle than Switch devices.
I’m glad this thing exists. There needs to be a Steam based portable device.
steam machine is awesome, a second generation is welcome
Definitely agree with this. Are the newest 4nm produced Ryzen Z1 processors more performant and "better" than the lowly 7-nm (now 6-nm) APUs in the Steam Deck? Yes - but are they THAT much more? Nope. To me, a Steam Deck 2 needs to be at least twice as fast, at the same TDP, as the current model. A game running at 30fps now, within 15-watts, needs to get to 60fps within that same 15-watts. And to get there, AMD is going to need TSMC's N3E or even N2 process nodes, the latter of which is a couple of years away still.
The Steamdeck is bandwidth limited first and foremost. 88GB/s just doesn't cut it.
They could easily increase performance by several multiples if they went with HBM memory at the same TDP, especially at higher resolution or when ray tracing is being used.
The Z1 being 120GB/s is more palatable for 1080P resolutions.
AMD's next-gen "Z2" aka. Phoenix 2 using Zen Compact cores would mean more TDP for the GPU, so there could be some big gains on the compute side even at the same old 7nm.
It is, but that is another reason to wait because I think AMD could go even more "custom" with a next-gen 3-nm/2-nm APU. With Valve saying Deck alone has sold in the millions, AMD should be willing to do more with the next one for memory bandwidth. Instead of using their standard PC LPDDR5 interface, why not go the console route and put in GDDR memory? And with GDDR7 releasing in 2H 2024, that is a prime candidate for it. A 128-bit (same size as current Deck's APU) GDDR7 config would give Deck 2 a crazy 512GB/sec of bandwidth.
