Valve's dream of living room entertainment is not dead, and the Steam Machine has been reborn.

"Everyone else thought you wouldn't make it, but you proved them all wrong." This popular internet catchphrase fits Valve's handheld console, the Steam Deck, perfectly. Its 13 - week consecutive reign at the top of the Steam sales chart has silenced the outside world's doubts. As of August 2025, the global sales of this Steam handheld console have exceeded 4 million units. With the success of the Steam Deck as a precedent, Valve seems to have regained confidence and is once again preparing to enter the living - room entertainment market.

Recently, overseas tech media WccfTech reported that Valve is developing a gaming device codenamed Fremont. It is reported that this model equipped with a customized AMD Hawk Point 2 has appeared on GeekBench, with a single - core score of 2412 points and a multi - core score of 7451 points.

According to relevant reports, the AMD Hawk Point 2 features a ZEN 4 architecture CPU with 6 cores and 12 threads, a base frequency of 3.2GHz, a maximum boost frequency of up to 4.8GHz, and is equipped with 16MB of L3 cache and 6MB of L2 cache. In contrast, the Aerith processor of the Steam Deck has 4 cores and 8 threads, a base frequency of 2.8GHz, a maximum boost frequency of 3.5GHz, and L3 and L2 caches of 4MB and 2MB respectively.

In addition, the Valve Fremont also has a GPU based on the RDNA 3 architecture, possibly a rebranded version of the Radeon RX 7600. It will be equipped with 28 - 32 compute units and at least 8GB of dedicated video memory, which is a qualitative leap compared to the Steam Deck's integrated graphics with 8 compute units.

Although the Radeon RX 7600, a graphics card launched in May 2023, is slightly inferior to NVIDIA's RTX 5050 in performance, thanks to the energy - efficiency optimization of the RDNA 3 architecture and the FSR 3.0 frame - generation technology, it can be regarded as a benchmark for cost - performance at 1080P resolution.

It's not hard to notice that the hardware specifications of the Valve Fremont are significantly different from those of the Steam Deck and the Steam Deck OLED. The CPU + GPU combination clearly targets PCs or gaming consoles. Friends familiar with Valve, upon seeing the parameters of the Valve Fremont, might blurt out, "Gabe Newell is trying to revive Steam Machines."

Most domestic players first encountered Steam through the extremely popular battle - royale game "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" in 2017 and thus got to know the company Valve. Valve first entered the hardware field on a large scale in 2015 when they launched the Steam Link streaming box, the Steam Controller game controller, and the Steam Machine computer all at once. Among them, the Steam Machine was the cornerstone for Valve to build an integrated desktop gaming ecosystem.

Unfortunately, the Steam Machine not only failed to become an instant success but also became Valve's biggest failure to date. Both players and developers showed little interest in it. In fact, the failure of the Steam Machine stemmed from Valve's attempt to build an ecosystem free from the influence of Windows, similar to Sony's PlayStation. At that time, Microsoft launched the Windows 8 operating system, and its built - in Windows Store became a direct competitor to Steam, making Valve feel pressured.

After all, when facing Microsoft, which showed an intention to intervene in PC digital game distribution, Steam, which relied on Windows, always seemed to be at a disadvantage. So, to reduce its dependence on Windows, the Steam OS that came with the Steam Machine was developed based on Debian GNU/Linux. However, this decision led to the Steam Machine's lack of effective support for mainstream games.

For a gaming device with no games to play, there is only one inevitable outcome. Of course, the Steam Machine was not completely useless. The core technology, the Proton compatibility layer, used in the current version of Steam OS on the Steam Deck is the result of the technological heritage from that time, which also solves the problem of Linux's lack of game compatibility. Coupled with the explosive growth of the influence of the Steam platform in the past decade or so, with the number of concurrent users increasing from less than 10 million to over 40 million, no game manufacturer can ignore its existence.

So, the question arises: After addressing the shortage of playable games on Linux, can the Valve Fremont replicate the success of the Steam Deck? It can only be said that the probability of the Valve Fremont repeating the failure of the Steam Machine is probably much higher than it becoming the next Steam Deck. This is because the Valve Fremont faces a problem that the Steam Deck doesn't need to consider, which is the game's visual effects.

For a handheld console, most players' requirements are for the games to run smoothly and for the console to have a certain battery life. However, for PCs and gaming consoles, the visual performance becomes the top priority. The problem with the Valve Fremont is that its hardware can only ensure smooth gameplay at 1080P resolution. Currently, in the PC and gaming - console fields, 2K resolution is gradually taking the lead. Coupled with the performance loss caused by the Proton compatibility layer, the Valve Fremont may not even be able to "handle" 1080P resolution.

Although the problem of insufficient performance can be tolerated by handheld - console players, the same problem has a different answer when it comes to desktop devices.

This article is from the WeChat official account "3eLife" (ID: IT - 3eLife), written by 3eLife Reporter. It is published by 36Kr with permission.