New Steam Deck 2 leak gets its strongest evidence yet as leaker claims new AMD APU was built for Valve’s next handheld, and the rumored specs point to a big upgrade

Steam Deck 2 leak gets new backing as known hardware leaker claims AMD built Gainsborough for Valve, while rumored RDNA 4M specs point to a bigger upgrade ahead.

The AMD codename “Gainsborough” has spent the last few days looking suspiciously like a Steam Deck 2 chip without anything tying it directly to Valve. The name appeared in AMD’s Adrenalin 26.9.2 driver, while shipping records linked it to a new FF6 package.

The obvious clue is the name itself. The original Steam Deck APU is known as Aerith, and Aerith Gainsborough is the full name of the Final Fantasy VII character. Recent reporting also described Gainsborough as a semi-custom N3P design, although neither AMD nor Valve has announced the chip for a retail product.

Valve’s public position gives the rumor some room to make sense. Designer Pierre-Loup Griffais said that the current memory crunch had “not really” changed Valve’s Steam Deck 2 plans, and the company is still figuring out “how and when” it can ship a proper generational upgrade.

Valve has repeatedly said more performance isn’t enough if battery life and power efficiency take a big hit, which is why a newer low-power AMD design matters more than a simple compute-unit count.

Now, a well-known hardware leaker, Moore’s Law Is Dead, says he has something the earlier driver and shipping clues did not: a source who worked on Gainsborough.

Steam Deck 2 Leak Now Has a Claimed AMD Source Behind Gainsborough

During the latest Broken Silicon podcast, Moore’s Law Is Dead said an AMD contact who worked on Gainsborough reached out after his earlier reporting. According to MLID, the source told him the chip was built as a next-generation handheld APU on N3P by AMD’s S3 semi-custom team and was designed for one specific customer rather than the wider laptop market.

MLID takes that as direct confirmation that Gainsborough was designed for Steam Deck 2. Designing a chip for Valve doesn’t mean Valve eventually decided to use it, though. MLID specifically raises the possibility that Valve could pass on Gainsborough and AMD could repurpose the silicon for something like a future Ryzen Z3 product.

“Someone who worked on it, says this was a semicustom next-gen gaming handheld APU for one customer,” MLID said.

Take all of this with the usual grain of salt. Valve and AMD haven’t confirmed Gainsborough as the Steam Deck 2 APU. The new claim goes considerably further than the earlier codename coincidence and shipping records, but it still isn’t a product announcement.

The Rumored Steam Deck 2 Specs Point to a Much Bigger Upgrade

The spec rumor is a separate part of the story. MLID says other hardware leakers, including Captain McShotgun, have claimed Gainsborough carries 12 RDNA 4M compute units on TSMC N3P.

MLID says he cannot verify that 12-CU figure himself, although he estimates a chip with that configuration could reach roughly 2.3x to 3.2x the original Steam Deck’s raster performance at handheld power levels.

A 12-CU number can look underwhelming beside newer 16-CU handheld chips. Architecture changes make that comparison messy. MLID points to his own RDNA 4 testing as the reason he expects much higher performance per CU, along with stronger ray tracing and the possibility of FSR 4-class upscaling. In his view, the combined improvement could be much larger than the CU count suggests.

Steam Deck 2’s rumored specs looks like this:

• Intended device: AMD Gainsborough was reportedly designed as a semi-custom next-generation handheld APU for one customer.
• Process node: TSMC N3P has been linked to Gainsborough in MLID’s earlier documentation.
• GPU: 12 RDNA 4M compute units are rumored by separate hardware leakers.
• Performance: MLID estimates roughly 2.3x to 3.2x Steam Deck raster performance if the 12-CU claim is accurate.
• Graphics features: FSR 4-class upscaling and much stronger ray tracing could come with the newer architecture.

Would that kind of performance jump be enough to make you upgrade from the current Steam Deck, or would you rather Valve wait for something even faster? Let us know in the comments.