In a recent interview, the people at Valve were commenting that they have no plans, at the moment, to release a Steam V2, but to make a better battery and lighter version of their laptop. That is, what would be known colloquially as a Steam Deck Lite. That is why we have decided to review the changes and improvements that a Valve console revision could have.
In a recent interview with The Verge, Valve has announced that they plan to make a lighter, battery-powered iteration of their Steam Deck. That is why and knowing that the chip will continue to be from AMD, make a list of the changes that the console would have with the improvements that have been seen in the world of hardware since Gabe Newell’s company finished the original design.
A Steam Deck Lite is required
And we don’t say it, but Valve itself believes it. You just have to see the enormous size of the console compared to the Nintendo Switch, which is not exactly small to corroborate it. Besides the limited battery life. And it is that the chip designed by AMD for Steam is, literally and taking into account that we are talking about playing anywhere, a true brown beast and without a doubt the best of its kind. Let’s not forget that it was created specifically for the console, but that its design predates some later projects that are more energy efficient.
What changes would the Steam Deck Lite chip have?
We see three different changes possible, two of them would come from the Ryzen 6000 series APUs which were a post Van Gogh chip design.
- For one, the internal interconnect on the chip was redone to consume less power. Today, 2/3 parts of a processor are precisely that, internal communication, and it is the part that uses the most energy. So it makes sense that they take that part from the Ryzen 6000 for laptops going forward.
- As for the other change derived from the latest APUs for laptops, there is the fact that, despite sharing RDNA 2 GPUs, the Ryzen 6000 version is better optimized for consumption. So it could achieve the same performance as the original Steam Deck while generating less heat.
As for the third point, it would be in the CPU, the change of the 4 Zen 2 cores with SMT for 8 Zen 3 or Zen 4 cores with this function disabled. The number of threads would be the same, but all of us who have a bit of knowledge know why multithreading is not used in laptop processors, plus that 8 cores are more efficient than 8 threads. On the other hand, the use of more advanced architectures, but fully compatible, allows the use of lower clock speeds, which also leads to potential undervolting and with it lower consumption and thus having more battery hours.
The console would be narrower
All of this would help to require a less complex cooling and ventilation system and, therefore, with less height, which would make the console weigh less and be much lighter. With this we would have already reduced one of the dimensions of the console and we would already have a lighter Steam Deck Lite that will not tire our hands so much from using it for a long time.
Another of the changes that we could see would be a redistribution of the buttons. That is to say, that the button panel and the crosshead are not attached to the side of the sticks, but just below. That is, in a stick, crosshead/button/trackpad hierarchy. This would simply reduce the width of the console. In any case, the only dimension that we don’t think can be trimmed is the height of the console.
RAM type LPDDR5X
Outside the chip, although the interface with it will be on the processor itself, there is the use of LPDDR5X memory, let’s remember that the Steam Deck uses LPDDR5, since the standard of the improved version had not been released. To have a faster memory? No, to have a memory with a lower energy consumption per transfer using the same bandwidth. This is a similar change to what Nintendo made with its Nintendo Switch models released in 2019, which shipped with LPDDR4X memory instead of LPDDR4 memory.
Make it easy to include an NVMe SSD
Valve has not designed the Steam Deck so that novice users can change the NVMe SSD in the console, they are not against that it can be done, but the operation is at least quite complicated to do it, since it forces us to change to open the console. For us, the ideal thing would be to have a small pack, which we can open with our fingernails by lifting the lid or, if desired, with a screw. In other words, it is not more difficult to change the storage unit than it is to do it in the case of the PS5.
A screen without frames, please
And to finish, we do not believe that Valve reduces the distances with the buttons. However, we do see the possibility of eliminating the side part of the frame in order to slightly reduce its dimensions. It wouldn’t be a very big change. In reality, and being realistic, we do not see that they can make a design with the same size as a standard Nintendo Switch, but it does result in a noticeable cut in size and that it is appreciable and valued by everyone.
