Steam Hardware Survey April 2022
(Image credit: Valve)
As spotted by Reddit user coolbho3k on the r/SteamDeck subreddit, Valve appears to be testing a new SteamOS-based device. The mysterious device, which Valve calls Fremont, seems to be the long-awaited successor to the Steam Box.
The Steam Deck kernel was updated a month ago for a device codenamed Fremont, which doesn’t correspond to any officially released Valve product. The kernel update is brief and only changes a single character on a single line. However, there are some nuggets of information: references to a ChromeOS Embedded Controller (CEC) driver, Google Dexi, and AMD Lilac.
The CEC driver and Google Dexi are not much of a mystery. The driver is used in tandem with a CEC, a chip with Chromebooks that controls processor power and thermal management, sensors, and the keyboard. Meanwhile, Google Dexi is a “device… which enables the HDMI CEC,” according to Google, which added it to the Linux kernel a year ago.
AMD Lilac, however, is more of an unknown quantity. It appears to be the name of a development motherboard for mobile AMD Ryzen processors, so it's probably not unique to Valve. Lilac was first spotted in Geekbench two years ago, running Ubuntu and a Ryzen Embedded V3C48 (Rembrandt) APU. More recent AMD Lilac spottings include the Ryzen 7 7735HS (Rembrandt-R) and the Ryzen 5 8540U (Hawk Point).
Therefore, it isn't easy to pinpoint the exact chip. For reference, Rembrandt combines Zen 3+ and RDNA 2 graphics; meanwhile, Hawk Point leverages the newer Zen 4 and RDNA 3 duo.
While it’s clear that Lilac is not exclusively Valve’s, Fremont may have already leaked onto Geekbench. By far, most Lilac submissions to the benchmarking platform come from a system that uses the Ryzen 5 8540U and the RX 7600M XT, and Reddit users argue that this is Fremont. These results were uploaded in batches from June to October this year; if Valve plans to launch a new PC shortly, testing it in recent months would make sense.
We searched for laptops and desktops that used this APU-GPU combination and came up empty-handed, so this could be Valve’s Fremont device, as the Reddit user speculates. If it is, then it’s almost certainly not going to be the Steam Deck 2 since the 7600M XT is rated for 120 watts, far too hot to be cooled by the kind of cooler that could fit into a handheld PC.
If Valve releases a PC with these two chips, it's far more likely to be a Steam Box successor. Although Valve could use desktop-grade hardware rather than mobile chips, it has more experience with AMD’s mobile hardware thanks to the Steam Deck, and mobile processors would allow Valve to build a more compact, efficient, and customized PC. Fremont might even be a new VR headset; it’s just hard to say what it is with any certainty.
However, it could also be another unreleased device from a different company. Tuxedo notably released its Sirius 16 Gen2 laptop this year, and it uses the Ryzen 7 8845HS (a Hawk Point APU like the 8540) and an RX 7600M XT, so laptops that combine a Ryzen 8000 chip and the 7600M XT do exist. However, the 8540 Lilac results used Windows 11 Pro, not Linux, so these submissions are unlikely to be for an unreleased model of the Sirius 16.
It’s also unclear why Fremont would use a CEC that is generally found on Chromebooks. The author of the Reddit post speculates that Google is involved with Fremont’s development in some form, to the point that it might even run ChromeOS instead of SteamOS to get access to Android TV apps.
Matthew Connatser
Matthew Connatser is a freelancing writer for Tom's Hardware US. He writes articles about CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and computers in general.