Looks like Valve is cooking up another product, if the recent sighting of this Geekbench entry is anything to go by. According to Videocardz, the codename “Fremont” has been circulating since last year, although the nature of the product this chip will be powering is unknown at this point (a standalone gaming console would be a good guess, however).
This Is Valve “Fremont”
Specifically, this is said to be a semi-custom APU coming from AMD once again, who previously collaborated with the gaming company to develop the ‘Van Gogh’ APU for Steam Decks. The benchmark entry tells us that the CPU side of things features 6 cores, which is based on “Hawk Point 2” (Zen 4) architecture, while the Geekbench JSON entry revealed the GPU is comprised of a “Radeon RX 7600 series” GPU – if this refers to the silicon found in the desktop GPU, we’re looking at 32 Compute Units based on RDNA3 architecture.
All told, the performance is likely on par or slightly less than that of the Ryzen AI Max series APUs, which comes with newer architectures on both CPU (Zen 5) and GPU (RDNA3.5) fronts. On paper, the differences between Zen 4 and Zen 5, along with RDNA3 and RDNA3.5 are relatively small, so a hypothetical gaming console with similar power targets shouldn’t be too far off AMD’s current best laptop chip; if the form factor allows the chip to target higher TDPs (say, 180W), they should outperform the Ryzen AI Max chips slightly.
While the form factor of the machine this chip will be powering is plain speculation at this point, there is a precedence on this. More than a decade ago, Valve tried to enter the console market via its Steam Machines project, but it was left unsuccessful; however, today’s gaming landscape has changed a fair bit, in no small part thanks to the company’s efforts in making Linux gaming much more viable than before, along with the success of the Steam Deck handheld.
Pokdepinion: I can see a gaming console happening, and it could on paper compete directly against Xbox since that console is heading towards a platform-agnostic future.
