There have long been rumors suggesting Valve is secretly developing a new SteamOS device, codenamed “Fremont,” which could be a gaming console or a gaming box akin to the canceled Steambox. X user SadlyItsDadley has uncovered what appears to be the first benchmark of this mythical Fremont device, which is powered by an AMD processor.
Valve will continue to tap AMD for silicon to power its Fremont project. The benchmark features an “AMD Custom CPU 1772” chip, which belongs to AMD’s Hawk Point 2 family, utilizing Zen 4 execution cores and RDNA 3 graphics. However, there was no mention of any Radeon 700M-series iGPU, which implies that AMD may have disabled this part of the silicon.
Instead, the AMD chip emerged with a Radeon RX 7600. It’s worth highlighting that Geekbench detected the desktop variant, not the mobile Radeon RX 7600M. This makes perfect sense, since a gaming console or gaming box would require more graphics firepower than what Hawk Point can offer. Furthermore, having its dedicated memory means the graphics card doesn’t have to share memory with the system.
Unfortunately, Geekbench didn’t provide any specifications on the Radeon RX 7600. However, we already know that the Navi 33-powered graphics card features 32 RDNA 3 CUs and 8GB of GDDR6 memory. It remains unknown whether AMD will make any changes to the Radeon RX 7600 that will be used in Fremont.
Valve Fremont Specifications
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|
Device |
Codename |
Processor |
Codename |
Architecture |
Cores / Threads |
Base / Boost Clock (GHz) |
iGPU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Unknown |
Fremont |
AMD 1772 |
Hawk Point 2 |
Zen 4 |
6 / 12 |
3.2 / 4.8 |
N/A |
|
Steam Deck OLED |
Galileo |
AMD 0405 |
Van Gogh |
Zen 2 |
4 / 8 |
2.4 / 3.5 |
8 RDNA 2 CUs |
Hawk Point is a substantial upgrade from Van Gogh, which powered Valve’s Steam Deck OLED (codename “Galileo”). Although Valve isn’t hopping on AMD’s latest Zen 5 architecture, Hawk Point is at least two generations newer than Van Gogh. Furthermore, the Hawk Point chip features a six-core, 12-thread configuration, a whopping 50% improvement over the original Van Gogh chip inside the Steam Deck OLED.
Besides the architectural and core upgrades, the Hawk Point processors also flaunt higher clock speeds. During the Geekbench benchmark, the chip exhibited a base clock of 3.2 GHz and a boost clock of 4.8 GHz. That’s leagues above the Van Gogh part with clock speeds between 2.4 GHz and 3.5 GHz.
Judging by the specifications, the Hawk Point processor is likely the Ryzen 5 8540U, which is a mid-range mobile processor found in many laptops due to its performance and power efficiency.
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|
Processor / Device |
Single-Core Score |
Multi-Core Score |
|---|---|---|
|
Valve Fremont |
2,412 |
7,451 |
|
Core i3-13100F |
2.262 |
7,584 |
|
Valve Galileo |
1,217 |
4,096 |
Two Fremont submissions had very similar scores. For the sake of comparison, we picked the highest submission. For Galileo, we used one of the latest entries, while the other scores are from Geekbench’s database.
Performance-wise, the Hawk Point processor delivered almost twice the single- and multi-threaded performance of the Van Gogh part. This was expected, given the two generations that separate the two processors. Compared to a desktop part, the Hawk Point chip has comparable performance to the Core i3-13100F.
The benchmark indicates that Fremont was running on Windows 11 Pro, suggesting it is likely an engineering device, and that the specifications are not final. However, from what we can gather at this time, Fremont poses to perform like a Core i3-13100F paired with a Radeon RX 7600.
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