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The speculation for the next iteration of the Steam Deck is most likely going to only increase with CES 2025 starting this week. There are plans for tons of new hardware announcements, both for new handhelds and new parts to use in handhelds, and discussion about what that means for the future of the handheld PC space is going to be all over the place. However, as much as we would love to see a new, more powerful version of the device, it looks like we will be waiting a little longer for it.

Recently, Videocardz published an article that leaked some of the details for the next version of AMD's Z-series APUs, the Z2 and Z2E chips. They discussed how the chips will be used with ASUS and Lenovo devices in the future, and mentioned that they will be used with Valve's Steam Deck. One of the public faces of the Steam Deck's development team, Pierre-Loup Griffais, posted a public statement on Bluesky to retort and mention this is inaccurate:

There is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck. Guessing the slide was meant to say the series is meant for products like that, not announcing anything specific.

— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@plagman.bsky.social) 2025-01-06T13:02:05.934Z

We will most likely have to wait a little bit longer before we get any announcement of a 2nd generation Steam Deck, and I would guess either the end of this year or next. I do believe Valve will most likely go with a custom-built APU again, similar to the one that was made for the Deck, but nothing is confirmed until Valve has the say.

However, we can take a look at the new Z2 chips! It seems that it will be similar to the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chips I have been seeing recently, with a similar graphics model (Radeon 890M) and 8 CPU cores. There will be 3 versions of the chip with different CPU and GPU core components:

AMDZ2ChipsLeak
  • Z2 Go (4 CPU cores and 12x RNDA 2 GPU cores)
  • Z2 (8 CPU cores and 12x RDNA 3 GPU cores)
  • Z2 Extreme (8 CPU cores and 16x RDNA 3.5 GPU cores)

The Z2 Extreme sounds like it will be a decent increase in performance over the Z1 Extreme, though it may not be enough to start playing huge games that we couldn't before. This is still an exciting time, and I can't wait to see the Z2 chips in the field.

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Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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