Valve has just announced a new Steam Machine system.
A Valve engineer has indicated that a Steam Deck 2 is still a long way off
There isn’t a powerful enough chip to do the sequel justice, we’re told
However, Valve does have a „pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be“
All the chatter has been about the new Steam Machine since Valve revealed its plans to resurrect the device, but the Steam Deck 2 has also been mentioned amid said chatter – though we’re told the time still isn’t right for a sequel to the portable.
That’s what we heard from Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais (who works on SteamOS) in an interview with IGN which was mostly focused on the Steam Machine.
However, when IGN mentioned the Steam Deck and how it’s „aging a little bit“, and whether there might be any plans for an upgraded handheld, Griffais repeated previous sentiment that we aren’t yet at a point where upgrading the internal components would make enough difference to a potential Steam Deck 2.
Griffais observed: „We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance [than the existing Steam Deck] at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.
„So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.“
In short, while there may be some powerful new SoCs – system-on-chips, meaning all-in-one processor and graphics solutions – on the market, they aren’t peppy enough right now.
