The second-generation Steam Deck upgrade focuses on the screen and battery
Steam Deck has topped Steam’s best-selling chart for 30 of the past 41 weeks. In addition to affordable prices and increased production capacity, Valve has released more than 90 updates since the release of Steam Deck. Quickly fixing bugs and resolving compatibility issues has made Steam Deck more stable. Recently, The Verge interviewed Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais.
While some new games won’t run on the Steam Deck pipeline, Valve isn’t in a rush to improve its performance. The designer said that performance is not the focus of the second-generation Steam Deck. Instead, it will improve the display quality and battery life of the device, which will be reflected in the next-generation product. In terms of performance, major upgrades will not be considered until the architecture has developed significantly, bringing considerable performance benefits, which means that a performance level will be maintained for a long time.
The second-generation Steam Deck is currently in development, and the screen and battery will be the focus of improvements. The new device may be improved similar to what Nintendo did with the Nintendo Switch. For some players, this kind of upgrade will feel uncomfortable, but it is a common practice in the field of game consoles. From another point of view, doing so will also have better compatibility, and at the same time can better control costs. For developers and users, unified specifications are beneficial.
The AMD custom APU equipped with Steam Deck is called “Aerith”, which is manufactured with a 7nm process. The CPU based on the Zen 2 architecture has 4 cores and 8 threads, and the frequency is between 2.4 GHz and 3.5 GHz. The integrated RDNA 2 architecture GPU has 8 computing units, and the frequency is between 1.0 GHz and 1.6 GHz. The power consumption of the whole SoC is between 4W and 15W.
