It’s CES time, folks. This year’s iteration of the show has well and truly kicked off with new hardware reveals – many of which you won’t be able to afford, new gimmicks, flashy presentations, and far too many mentions of AI. CES is also a time for new chip reveals, and AMD tends to bring the goods each year.
The chipmaker is pretty much the only one that matters in the gaming handheld space at the moment, so there’s a lot of excitement about the new Z2 processor and the devices it’s going to be powering very soon. Unfortunately, even though AMD said so, that won’t actually include a new Steam Deck.
AMD unveiled the new Ryzen Z2 series of APUs, designed for low-power devices, such as gaming handhelds. The Z1 and Z1 Extreme can be found in plenty of first-generation handhelds, and this next iteration already has several of them lined up for an upgrade.
As part of a CES call announcing the new series (via PC Gamer), AMD said that Z2-equipped handhelds are on the way “from a number of partners, the Legion Go, the ROG Ally, the Valve Steam Deck.” This is obviously big news, but only because that last one is unexpected. It’s also, apparently, not accurate.
Valve engineer and Steam Deck developer Pierre-Loup Griffais very quickly took to Bluesky to clarify that “There is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck.” He also added what most of us were probably thinking, that the slide was likely intended to say “meant for products like that, not announcing anything specific.”
Valve has long said it’s not interested in designing a new Steam Deck unless it could offer a meaningful generational upgrade over the current model, but the company also said last year that we won’t see a Steam Deck 2 until at least late 2025, so there’s a chance – assuming a new one launches later this year – it’s going to be using technology that’s just been announced, or perhaps a modified version of that. Manufacturing takes time, after all.
Like its predecessor, the Z2 architecture includes a CPU and GPU on the same chip. There will be three available models, the Z2 Extreme, standard Z2, and Z2 Go. The two upper-end options are nearly identical, except for the Extreme’s more powerful GPU thanks to having four extra GPU cores. The Extreme uses RDNA 3.5 architecture, and none of Z2s will utilise the just-announced RDNA 4.