New Steam Console Powered by RDNA 4 Might Be in the Works at Valve
According to a fresh rumor, Valve might be working on a new Steam console powered by the RDNA 4-based AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics card.
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Interesting that it uses a dedicated 9070 (ugh that name), rather than being a custom APU, like the other AMD consoles and the deck. That just adds cost and design complexity. You've got to package multiple chips, have separate power circuitry for both, have separate memory pools, and a more complex cooling system.
That said, perhaps they're being cautious - if you can't sell a lot of them, a custom APU isn't worth it. It's also probably much faster to bring to market if you're using off-the-shelf parts.
E: the source appears to only say Valve is working on 9070 drivers, therefore a steam machine must use a 9070. That's a bit of a logic jump. For starters, any driver work on the 9070 will improve any other RDNA4 chips (including APUs). Also, Valve has done driver work on plenty of things that they don't use in their own hardware, from various AMD cards, Intel graphics, and even work on the open source Nvidia drivers - they are gearing up to a general release of SteamOS, after all.
TL;DR: this rumour is almost certainly bullshit.
Also, Valve has done driver work on plenty of things that they don’t use in their own hardware, from various AMD cards, Intel graphics, and even work on the open source Nvidia drivers
Valve developers are the main contributors to the RADV Vulkan driver so they've done work on pretty much every AMD card that supports Vulkan. So yeah, pretty silly rumour if that's the evidence.
Surely this just adds cost and design complexity.
I'd say it's the opposite - it's just a small form factor PC with off the shelf components
Like I said, it's likely cheaper if you're not going to sell many units, but if you can recoup the design costs through selling a decent amount, it can easily become cheaper.
Less in the way of packaging costs, fewer VRMs and other power circuitry, a less advanced cooling setup, and – probably most critically – you only need one pool of memory, not dedicated RAM for the CPU and separate VRAM for the GPU.
you only need one pool of memory
RAM is dirt cheap lately, so I don't think it would make sense to design entire custom circuitry to save on that
It absolutely would. 16GB of VRAM and another 16GB of system RAM adds up. Plus the other associated costs.
The rumour is nonsense and Valve isn't making a console with a 9070.
The rumour is nonsense and Valve isn't making a console with a 9070
Valve isn't making a console, but independent OEMs definetly are. There were branding guidlines released by Valve some time ago. It looks like Valves plan is to maintain the operating system, while everyone else is making hardware running it.
If you want to sell a Steam console, it has to do 4k pretty well, because that's what TVs have these days. An APU won't cut it for that, you'll need a discrete GPU.
Not a laptop-class one, no. That's why I said custom. A PS5 Pro uses an APU and is more powerful than most people's desktops.
But not as powerful as the average gaming PC. If you take a mini ITX board, an every level Ryzen processor and something like an RX 7700 that would make a pretty cool system. If you manage to sell that for under $600, you have a winner.
A PS5 Pro is far more powerful than the average gaming PC.
And I don't know why you think an APU can't achieve good performance. The PS5 Pro manages it despite being a small die size and an old CPU architecture.
You talk of the need to make it manufacturable cheaply - that's what APUs are good at. Having it across several chips that need more expensive board layouts, far more memory, and more advanced cooling adds cost.