A new leak suggests that a successor to the Steam Deck 2 won’t be coming for another three years.
The Steam Deck hit the market around three and a half years ago. Valve showed real foresight with this move, as numerous manufacturers have since recognized the potential of mobile consoles.
Some of these handhelds are already in their second generation – only the Steam Deck is still holding back a little when it comes to launching a “real” successor. According to the rumor mill, we will probably have to wait years for such a Steam Deck 2.
Steam Deck 2 not coming for three years – and that probably has something to do with AMD
Kepler_L2, a leaker considered to be reliable, stated rather succinctly on the NeoGAF forum that Steam Deck 2 is not planned until 2028. The leaker did not provide any further explanation, so we will attempt to assess the situation ourselves at this point.
About a year ago, Lawrence Yang, one of the designers of the Steam Deck, stated that Valve categorically rules out an annual handheld upgrade. He said that the time for a successor would only come when two conditions were met:
- The performance of the underlying APU would have to make a “generational leap.” However, the Valve designer did not go into any further detail.
- At the same time, the performance boost must not be accompanied by poorer battery life.
This generational leap could come with the upcoming series of AMD processors – more specifically, the next architectures based on Zen 6 and RDNA 5, aka UDNA.
These chips have already appeared in initial leaks in recent days: Among other things, there has been speculation that AMD is producing “AT3” and “AT4” dies, which feature 1,536 and 768 FP32 computing units, respectively, and are specifically intended for handhelds and tablets.
- In both cases, there would be significantly more shader units than in the “revised” Steam Deck APU. This is where the six-nanometer “Sephiroth” chip with 512 FP32 units based on RDNA 2 comes in.
- Both AT3 and AT4 would meet the conditions mentioned by Yang: more performance, but also (at least) consistent battery life, as the next chip generation will likely be manufactured using TSMC’s N3 process with a structure width of three nanometers.
Production of the UDNA GPUs is scheduled to start in the second quarter of 2026. The same applies to the Zen 6 architecture in the context of the CPU, which is also expected to be featured in the first models at the end of next year. Among the chosen few are the PlayStation 6 and Xbox Next, which are expected to feature the new generations.
But wait a minute: where does that leave us with the remaining year and a half or so between the start of production in the second quarter of 2026 and the rumored release period for the Steam Deck 2? To answer this question, we must finally leave the path of reliable and conceivable information.
It is conceivable that Valve will take a similar approach to the second generation of handhelds as it did with the current Steam Deck: wait for a GPU generation before striking with the RDNA 6 (or UDNA 2) planned for 2028.
Since UDNA also represents a more comprehensive change in strategy, Valve, given its good reputation to date, will likely want to wait until the new architecture is truly stable.