Valve Announces The Steam Deck OLED With Upgraded Display, 6nm APU & Larger Battery

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Announces The Steam Deck OLED With Upgraded Display, 6nm APU & Larger Battery

Valve just announced the Steam Deck OLED as an upgraded version of their Steam Deck handheld Linux gaming device...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Deck-OLED

[Lbibass]

That limited edition with the transparent black shell looks AMAZING.

I love my Steam Deck.

But I cannot justify purchasing another, even if the display is HDR. I can only hope they'll release an upgrade kit or something.

[Mitch]

That limited edition with the transparent black shell looks AMAZING.

I love my Steam Deck.

But I cannot justify purchasing another, even if the display is HDR. I can only hope they'll release an upgrade kit or something.

It's probably largely for new buyers and possible converts from other handhelds. Someone can of course gift or resell a deck, but I don't think I'm in the position to spend that this round, regardless of the specs

[M@GOid]

The APU in the newer node and 25% bigger battery must give a nice bump in game time. Unless if the new screen have a much bigger power consumption.

[saladin]

Wasn't the first steam deck Zen 2 based with RDNA2 graphics? Are they switching to Zen 4 (unlikely on 6nm), sticking to Zen 2 on a node shrink, or taking inspiration from Rembrandt's Zen3+ on 6nm? The WIFI 6E seems to imply the latter.

Something doesn't compute.

[Mitch]

IIRC, zen4 has a mixed lithography. The laptop ones do 4NM finfet while the desktop ones are 5 or 6 I believe.

Zen4 has big improvements over 3 and 3 had improvements over 2, so I don't think the lithography being above 4nm is a big deal here. It lowers the cost and presumably improves the availability

[Mitch]

The APU in the newer node and 25% bigger battery must give a nice bump in game time. Unless if the new screen have a much bigger power consumption.

Valve claims the OLED also uses less power here. They say the overall battery life is 30 to 50 percent better

[brucethemoose]

"6nm APU"

Very interesting. N6 is backward compatible with N7, which is how they could pull this off: https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicat...form_DCE_N7_N6

And I know a lot people are wondering why they didn't go Zen4/RDNA3... And its because even the most miniscule change in silicon is tens or hundred of millions of dollars, upfront, before you even make a single chip. But switching an existing design to a compatible process skips most of that cost.


Even just shifting to N6 is a huge deal. It means AMD and Valve see this as a profitable market worth significant investment. Maybe they'll even revive the Van Gogh line for the Zen 5 generation.

[emansom]

Zen 4c cores would've been nice. Maybe in two years.

[NeoMorpheus]

HDR....hmmm.

I hope this means that ChimeraOS will get this soon.