AMD 'Gainsborough' Chip Leak Fuels Steam Deck 2 Speculation, but Questions Remain

The Steam Deck is four and a half years old, and handheld gamers have been waiting for a successor. Valve has consistently said it needs a new chip with a generational leap in performance and efficiency before it builds Steam Deck 2.

According to The Verge, leaker Moore's Law is Dead and IT Home reported the codename in the latest AMD drivers. The first Steam Deck chip was named Aerith after a character in Final Fantasy VII, and Gainsborough is her last name. IT Home checked import and export records and found AMD has already been shipping test equipment for the Gainsborough chip for validation, suggesting a potential customer might already be testing whether it is suitable for its device.

Those import records also show the Gainsborough chip will be fairly small, with an FF6 package measuring 25mm by 25mm. The Verge reported that leaker Gotou_3rd seemingly revealed AMD's next handheld chips, the Ryzen Z3 and Z3 Extreme, will also be 25mm by 25mm. Gotou also published a possible fragment of an AMD slide deck suggesting the Z3 targets 15 watts, the same power envelope as the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED.

But The Verge said this is not enough to tie Gainsborough specifically to a Steam Deck 2. A semi-custom chip does not always end up in its originally intended gadget. It has long been rumored that the Steam Deck's own semi-custom chip was not originally designed for the Steam Deck, but for a Magic Leap headset, and that it was shopped around for tablets, including a canceled Microsoft tablet, before Valve took advantage. Portions of the original Steam Deck chip went entirely unused.

The Verge also noted that Aerith for the Steam Deck, Sephiroth for the Steam Deck OLED and Gainsborough are not Valve's codenames. When The Verge visited Valve's headquarters in late 2023, the report said, Valve designers said they did not really want the Final Fantasy codenames and that AMD chose them. As further evidence that Valve is not tied to those names, when Microsoft and Asus picked the Ryzen Z2 A chip for the vanilla $500 Xbox Ally, they were choosing an Aerith Plus chip.

Size is another complication. The Verge said 25mm by 25mm might be small, but it is actually large for a Steam Deck. The original Steam Deck's Aerith chip reportedly measured 19mm by 19mm before it shrank to remove unused components in its Sephiroth revision. Still, the report suggested the chip could be efficient and potentially more affordable if it does not fall too far from AMD's 25mm by 25mm Ryzen Z3 tree.

Valve was still figuring out how and when to do a Steam Deck 2 as of last month, after it would theoretically have received these Gainsborough chips, according to The Verge. The report suggested Valve might be trying not to overpromise after this year's RAM-forced hardware delays.