Not Steam alone. Valve is preparing a handheld game console SteamPal on the AMD platform

The success of the Nintendo Switch saw similar handheld consoles appear from a wide variety of manufacturers. True, most often we are talking about very small companies and, accordingly, small volumes of release, but soon everything may change, and the Nintendo Switch will have a very strong competitor. After all, Valve gets down to business.

Not Steam alone.  Valve is preparing a handheld game console SteamPal on the AMD platform

The well-known service Steam is owned by Valve, and it is not surprising that the promising game console is named SteamPal. So it will be presented in retail, but now in internal documents the new product appears under the code designation Neptune. A prototype device under this name was lit up in the latest beta version of the Steam client.

Sources close to Valve confirm work on a handheld game console. It runs Linux and will go on sale by the end of the year. At the moment, the prototype is equipped with a controller similar to the Nintendo Switch controller, but it is not removable.

Not Steam alone.  Valve is preparing a handheld game console SteamPal on the AMD platform

One of the users of the largest American forum Reddit said that the console will support all games from the Steam catalog. She will receive a screen with a diagonal of 7-8 inches and some kind of AMD hybrid processor called Aerith. This codename hides the VanGogh APU – with a low power consumption (9 W), four processing cores on the Zen 2 architecture and a GPU on the RDNA 2 architecture. That is, in terms of architecture, the SteamPal platform will correspond to the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S and Series X platforms. But the performance of SteamPal, of course, will be much less. Thus, 8 computing units and 512 stream processors are assigned to the GPU of the portable set-top box platform.

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