VALVE presents Steam Deck with custom AMD APU

Somewhat surprisingly, VALVE just introduced Steam Deck. This is a portable device intended for portable access to your Steam game library. The first consoles are expected to be delivered in December 2021. Pricing starts at €419. a Reservations are possible from 7:00 pm tomorrow.

It provides technical data for a portable device with dimensions of 298 x 117 x 49 mm and a weight of 669 g. The integrated screen (LCD) is 7 inches and has a resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels. The maximum brightness should be 400 cd / m², and the frame rate is set at 60 Hz. The screen can be operated by touch.

In addition to the display, there are also several playback options built into the chassis. These include the A, B, X, and Y buttons, the D pad, the L and R analog triggers, and the L and R bumpers. There are also two display and menu buttons and four freely selectable grid buttons. The two large capacitive touch surface analog sticks are easy to reach for both thumbs. Finally, there are also 2 x 32.5 mm² touch surfaces. The gyroscope can convert motion changes in six directions.

The heart of the Steam Deck is a custom APU from AMD. This has four Zen-2 cores with SMT and an integrated graphics unit based on the RDNA-2 architecture with eight CUs and thus 512 shaders. The processor cores have a computing power of 448 GFLOPS for FP32 computations, and the GPU has 1.6 TFLOPS with the same resolution. CPU cores should run at a clock rate of 2.4 to 3.5 GHz. The GPU runs from 1.0 to 1.6 GHz, depending on the load. Power consumption should be between 4 and 15 watts. The wizard was previously sold under the codename Van Gogh and is rumored to have been discontinued. Now it appears in the final product.

The APU is supported by 16 GB LPDDR5 with 5,500 MB/s. There is 64GB of eMMC storage (connected via PCIe 2.0 x1) in every Steam Deck. Memory can be expanded with an NVMe SSD. This is then connected via PCIe 3.0 x4. It is unclear if an NVMe SSD can also be updated.

IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac is provided in 2.4 and 5 GHz as well as Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless communications. Connections are a 3.5 mm audio-out jack and a USB Type-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2) port. This is used to charge the battery, but data can also be exchanged. The battery has a capacity of 40 watts per hour and should last between two and eight hours. It charges at 45W (USB Type-C PD 3.0) via a Type-C connection. SteamOS 3.0 is used as the operating system.

Then further communications are provided via the dock. This includes DisplayPort 1.4 in Alt mode with up to 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 120Hz, HDMI 2.0, Ethernet, 1 x USB 3.1, and 2 x USB 2.0. The basin measures 117 x 29 x 50.5 mm and weighs approximately 120 grams. It is sold separately.

Steam Deck with 64GB eMMC starts at €419. The variant with 256 GB NVMe SSD costs 549 euros and 512 GB should be 679 euros.