No, an AMD Ryzen Z2 Steam Deck isn’t in the works says Valve employee
Ahead of CES 2025, an AMD spokesperson claimed that the brand’s new Ryzen Z2 Series processors would ship in future handheld gaming PCs including the Steam Deck. Now, a Valve employee has confirmed that this will not be the case.
According to PCGamer, the AMD spokesperson stated that the Z2 Series will be “coming to market from a number of partners” during a press briefing. This would allegedly include “the Legion Go, the ROG Ally, the Valve Steam Deck.”
«This really allows us to tap into what we see as an exciting and fast-growing portion of the market where many of our OEM partners are bringing some really cool and high-powered handheld solutions to market and delivering great battery life and performance,” the spokesperson continued.
An image of the Steam Deck was also included on a marketing slide, where it was placed alongside a breakdown of the AMD Ryzen Z2 Series and pictures of other handheld PCs. This led many to believe that a new model of the Steam Deck was in the pipeline featuring an AMD Ryzen Z2 Series processor.
“There is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck,” stated Valve employee and Steam Deck engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais in a recent post on Bluesky. Griffais added that “the slide was [likely] meant to say the series is meant for products like [the Steam Deck], not announcing anything specific.”
At the time of writing, the most recent Valve handheld is the Steam Deck OLED. It utilizes a custom AMD APU, which is paired with 16GB of DDR5 RAM, an NVMe SSD, and a 1280 x 800, 7.4-inch OLED touchscreen for a formidable handheld gaming experience.
Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehyyat have previously stated that Valve is planning “to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before the real second generation of Steam Deck”, so we probably shouldn’t expect a new model any time soon.
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