Details pertaining to what is possibly new hardware from Valve recently made their way online, under the codename Fremont. The supposed evidence was unearthed by X user Brad Lynch, who posted the details on the platform, over what they believe to be the alleged hardware.
Specifically, a device named Fremont was spotted in a recent change to the Steam Deck kernel. A deeper dive by the eagle-eyed enthusiasts revealed that the new hardware utilises AMD’s Lilac platform, which itself is a variant of AMD’s Ryzen 5 8540 APU, supposedly.
To be clear here. I'm of the belief this could still be in a handheld but would allow for docked performance to scale up when plugged in.
As in, AMD Lilac could be the Steam Deck 2 chip.
— Cary Golomb (@carygolomb) December 6, 2024
If this is to be believed, then one could reasonably expect Fremont to be built around AMD’s Zen4 CPU cores and RDNA3 GPU architecture. Sure, the chipmaker has already moved on with Zen5 and RDNA4 is just over the horizon, but an upgrade is still an upgrade.
Lilac’s GPU prowess is also believed to be on par with the Radeon RX 6600S, which is miles ahead of the Steam Deck’s Zen2 and RDNA2 cores, with a performance equivalence to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti.
Whether or not Fremont is hardware is the Steam Deck 2 or something entirely, that’s up to speculation for now. At this stage, we do not believe that it is Valve’s next-generation gaming handheld; an engineer at the company said that fans shouldn’t expect a successor to the Steam Deck for “another few years“, saying that a true next-generation Deck wouldn’t be possible without a significant bump in horsepower.
(Source: Reddit, Notebookcheck)
