The alleged Valve console is once again the subject of rumors. A new leak claims that the Steam Deck will be followed by a classic console.
With the arrival of the Steam Deck, Valve has established itself in the console market – albeit only in the handheld sector. According to new rumors, the operators of the Steam platform are now planning to take the next step.
At least that’s what the Spanish tech leaker “eXtas1s” claims, who has built up a reputation as a reliable leaker by correctly predicting less obvious games for the Xbox Game Pass, among other things. Nevertheless, you should treat the following information with caution.
“Fremont” has already appeared in a leak
Aside from the marginally cluttered teaser image in the video, there are some interesting statements from eXtas1s in it, some of which refer to information from an earlier leak from last December.
- Even then, it was said that Valve was working on a project codenamed “Fremont”. According to dataminers, the device should be a device with HDMI-CEC function and similarities to ChromeOS.
- At that time, however, it was unclear whether it should be a classic console or a streaming box in the style of Nvidia Shield.
According to eXtas1s, it is now clear that Valve is indeed working on a “real” console and that it is intended to compete with the current generation around the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox Series X/S.
To this end, Valve is said to be working closely with AMD: the company is already responsible for the SoC (System on a Chip) in the Steam Deck. In the OLED model, this is a custom APU codenamed “Van Gogh”, which consists of four Zen 2 cores and an RDNA 2 unit with eight compute units.
- For the presumed Steam console, RDNA 4 is said to be the underlying architecture.
- However, since the Steam console itself is still waiting to make its debut in the desktop market in the form of the Radeon RX 9070 (XT), this detail is likely to be the most questionable of all the information in the leak.
- However, Valve and the RX 9070 XT are not completely without any common ground: Valve is actively involved in the development of “RADV”. The free Vulkan graphics driver was recently released in a new version, which also targets the new RDNA-4 GPUs.
Much more sensible is the link to an already officially confirmed change in the Steam ecosystem, which eXtas1s cites. At CES 2025, Valve announced that other PC handhelds outside of the Steam Deck will run the in-house operating system SteamOS.- For the time being, this only includes the Lenovo Legion Go S, which will be launched in a version with the Valve operating system in addition to the Windows version.
- According to eXtas1s, the similarity to ChromeOS mentioned in the previous leak could refer to this: In the case of “Fremont”, an operating system derived from SteamOS would be conceivable, which would carry the corresponding “Powered by SteamOS” label.
