The device, codenamed Fremont, appears to be packing a serious AMD SoC that leaves the Steam Deck in the dust.
Spotted by @SadlyItsBradley, Fremont is powered by a custom AMD CPU labelled “1772,” tied to the Hawk Point 2 or Gorgon Point family. It carries six Zen 4 cores with 12 threads, 16 MB of L3 cache, 6 MB of L2 cache, and clocks between 3.2 and 4.8 GHz. It’s built on a 4nm process and uses AMD’s FP7 socket.
That’s a leap from Valve’s existing Steam Deck line-up, which uses the older Zen 2-based Aerith chip with just four cores and 8 threads. The Fremont chip doubles up in every meaningful way and scores 2412 in single-core and 7451 in multi-core Geekbench 6 tests nearly twice the performance of the Steam Deck OLED’s Galileo chip.
The GPU is where it gets interesting. Fremont reportedly includes a Radeon RX 7600 series graphics processor, suggesting this is not an integrated unit but a discrete RDNA 3 part with possibly 28 to 32 compute units and 8 GB of VRAM. That dwarfs the Deck’s 8CU RDNA 2 integrated GPU and positions Fremont much closer to desktop performance territory.
Previous speculation linked the so-called Aerith Plus SoC to Valve’s next handheld, but Fremont looks entirely different. Aerith Plus is a 20W chip with LPDDR5-8533 memory support, while Fremont is fitted with standard DDR5-5600 memory, suggesting a higher power target and a different use case.
Additional JSON hardware IDs confirm ties to AMD’s Ryzen SoC lineup and the RX 7600 GPU, lending more weight to this being a full-on console and not a mobile device. The leaked unit only carried 8 GB of RAM, but that may be a development kit or early test unit.
If true, Fremont would be Valve’s biggest hardware leap since the original Steam Deck and possibly the company’s first serious attempt at a living room console since the Steam Machines debacle. Combined with Steam OS and native Linux support, this could offer a real alternative to traditional consoles if Valve follows through this time.
For now, nothing is official. But the benchmark data and configuration suggest Valve is working on more than just another portable. Fremont could be the company’s most powerful and ambitious hardware yet.
