What if Valve gave Steam Machines a second chance, with a new AMD chip and all the experience acquired with the Steam Deck?
You've probably forgotten all about them, ingrates that you are. And yet, in 2015, Valve did indeed attempt to launch its own "PCs" largely focused solely on video games. Gabe Newell's company surrounded itself with partners such as Alienware, Falcon Northwest, CyberPowerPC, Origin PC, Gigabyte and Zotac, to name but a few. In France, Mateirle.net was the only Valve partner in the country. Almost all of them presented prototypes of their products at CES 2014. Alas, what followed was a fiasco. The official release took place in November 2015, but customers were not responding. Some partners even waited before releasing their products, and in the space of seven months, the balance sheet is more than meager: barely half a million units have been sold, and the adventure comes to an end even before the end of 2016.
You know the rest: Valve kept a low profile for years before releasing a new hardware product, the Steam Deck, in 2022. At a time when products of this kind hardly existed, Valve once again tried its hand at the adventure, but in this case it was largely successful, and the Steam Deck is now being copied with varying degrees of success by numerous manufacturers. Success enough for Valve to revive the Steam Machines question?
File extracted from Geekbench databases © Geekbench
Let's be clear from the outset: for the moment, there's nothing official in the sense that Valve has never hinted at such a return. What is official, however, is the appearance of a machine christened Valve Fremont in the databases of the Geekbench measurement tool. A machine for which we have some technical data, such as its processor, an " AMD CPU 1772 ", which is listed as belonging to the " Family 25 Model 124 Stepping 0 " family. According to American media such as Wccftech, this is a processor related to the Hawk Point 2 or Gorgon Point ranges, which tells us a lot about its architecture: it has 6 cores/12 Zen 4 threads, is engraved in 4 nm and equipped with 22 MB of combined cache. Finally, its operating frequencies range from 3.2 GHz base to 4.8 GHz boost. More importantly, there's no trace of an integrated graphics solution; on the contrary, Wccftech speaks of the presence of a dedicated radeon RX 7600 graphics card.
There's no question of going into the possible performance of such a configuration, which, moreover, may not be final. On the other hand, the presence of a dedicated graphics card rules out the possibility of a Steam Deck 2. With its graphics card offset from the processor, this Valve Fremont should be closer to a classic PC... hence the rumour of the return of Steam Machines. It's not a new rumour, either, as since the beginning of the year, there have been numerous hints and rumours of a possible return of Valve to the living room. The experience acquired with the Steam Deck, Valve's credibility as a promoter of a hardware platform and, perhaps most importantly, the remarkable rise of SteamOS as a credible gaming alternative to Windows are all elements clearly leaning in favor of a return of Steam Machines. All we can do now is wait for the next episode...
