Valve is 'hard at work' on the Steam Deck 2, but over four years after the OG Deck there's still no indication of a launch date

Over four years ago, we were already reporting that Valve was working on a Steam Deck 2. In 2023, Valve said the Deck 2 was at least a couple of years away. So, what the current sitrep? Short answer: still in progress, likely waiting on a decent new chip.

Speaking to IGN, Valve rep and Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais says that the company is "hard at work" on the Steam Deck 2, which is great. However, there's still no firm release date for the device.

Griffais says that learnings from everything from the new Steam Machine and Steam Controller will go into the device, but still wouldn't give any guidance on a possible release date. As ever, the sticking point seems to be a sufficiently advanced new APU in terms of both performance and efficiency.

Late last year when Valve announced the new Steam Machine, Griffais said, "we're not interested in getting to a point where it's 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that," adding, "right now there's no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck."

The current Deck uses AMD-sourced hardware, of course, specifically a custom chip with Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics. The Steam Deck OLED introduced a slightly refined and die-shrunk version of that chip, but it was essentially very similar hardware.

AMD has made significant advancements since those APUs were designed. But its APU division has arguably been slow to adopt cutting-edge manufacturing tech. Its very latest Gorgon Point APU, for instance, is a relatively minor respin of its existing Strix Point chip.

Both are based on AMD Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 technology with the same core counts and using essentially the same TSMC N4 silicon. Of course, Valve may well commission another custom APU. But you'd think the company would want to wait until AMD moves its APU tech onto TSMC's N3 technology, at the very least, if not its upcoming N2 node which is already in mass production.

We'd therefore guestimate that such a custom APU might be feasible for production late this year or early in 2027, which would likely translate into a launch window of late 2027, at the earliest, for a Steam Deck 2 device.

Personally, I'd like to see Valve jump all the way to TSMC's N2 node and deliver a really huge upgrade rather than something more incremental. That does seem to be the company's preference, going by the whole "50% better ain't good enough" vibe. Here's hoping.