Today (February 18th), TGA founder and host Geoff Keighley released a collection of early design shapes for the Steam Deck handheld, but in the end, Geoff deleted the relevant tweets for unknown reasons. According to the picture, Valve’s early design of Steam Deck has references. The Nintendo Switch handheld made a detachable handle similar to the Joycon, but this design was later abandoned for unknown reasons.
The Steam Deck is equipped with an SoC chip customized by Valve to AMD, codenamed Aerith, which actually corresponds to the APU processor of the AMD Van Gogh family, with a 7nm process and power consumption of 4~15W. The CPU part is based on the Zen 2 architecture, 4 cores and 8 threads, 2.4~3.5GHz, single-precision 448GFLOPs, slightly lower than the Ryzen 3 Pro 4450U (473.6 GFLOPs).
GPU part RDNA2 architecture, 8CU, frequency 1~1.6GHz, 1GB video memory, support FSR (Super Resolution Sharp Technology), DX12, etc., single-precision 1.6 TFLOPs, roughly the same grade as MX450. Of course, the machine also has 16GB of LPDDR5-5500 memory.
Steam Deck uses a 7-inch display, which can output 4K 120Hz or 8K 60Hz when inserted into the base, which kills the Nintendo Switch in seconds. After all, the base has DP1.4, USB-C3.2 Gen2 and other interfaces. In terms of price, the Steam Deck starts at $399 for 64GB eMMC, and the top 512GB SSD deluxe package is $649.