AMD Mendocino Laptops Make It Easy To Have A Steam Deck Laptop

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AMD recently released its brand new range of budget 'Mendocino' APUs that could seemingly allow users to have a Steam Deck laptop. The Steam Deck was announced last year, and it took the entire PC industry by storm. The handheld PC gaming market was a thriving but niche market before the Steam Deck. However, its announcement brought the idea of a portable gaming PC to the mainstream.

In terms of hardware, the Steam Deck is pretty unique compared to its competitors. While most of the handheld PCs in the market use mainline chips from AMD and Intel, Steam Deck comes equipped with a custom-made AMD APU. In terms of specifications, the APU powering Steam Deck has a 4-core, 8-thread processor based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture. Likewise, the Steam Deck GPU is based on the RDNA 2 architecture featuring eight compute units. The highest throughput of Steam Deck GPU is around 1.6 teraflops, which is roughly equivalent to an Nvidia GTX 950 or a GTX 1050.

Related: Steam Deck Drift Issue Has Already Been Fixed By Valve

The good news is that the AMD recently revealed a brand new budget APU, and it looks very similar to the chip powering the Steam Deck. The AMD Mendocino chip also features a 4-core/8-thread Zen 2 CPU and an RDNA 2 GPU. AMD has not revealed the exact number of GPU compute units, but it'll likely be higher. Moreover, a team of coders known as holoiso on Github made it possible to install the Steam Deck OS on almost every computer. With a similar APU as the Steam Deck and the support of its operating system, the upcoming AMD Mendocino laptops could make it way more accessible for everyone to get their hands on a Steam Deck laptop.

Making the Steam Deck OS run on a standard PC is probably the most challenging part of the