Steam Machine is back: Valve Fremont console has appeared in Geekbench

It has long been rumored that Valve is secretly developing a new SteamOS device codenamed Fremont, which could be a game console or TV set-top box similar to the canceled Steambox. User X with the nickname SaddyItsDadley discoveredseems to be the first results of testing this mythical Fremont device, which runs on an AMD processor.

So, Valve is indeed preparing a new device codenamed Fremont. It is already at such a level of readiness that has been tested in Geekbench. It seems that after the success of Steam Deck, the company decided to expand the list of its gaming devices. Unlike the of the last attempt with Steam MachinesNow the situation has changed. SteamOS has matured considerably and is capable of providing performance that is often as good as Windows. This gives Valve the basis for more aggressive promotion of alternative gaming platforms.

According to Geekbench, the Fremont gaming device is based on an AMD Hawk Point APU (Ryzen 8040 or Ryzen 200 series) with Zen 4 cores and Radeon 780M graphics with 12 RDNA3 compute units. However, in this case, it is not a standard APU variant but a custom solution. The JSON report mentions Radeon RX 7600and it is the desktop version, not the mobile 7600M. This is a Navi 33-class GPU with 32 RDNA3 compute units (2048 cores), a 128-bit memory bus, and 8 GB of GDDR6. Importantly, Geekbench found no trace of an integrated 780M, which could mean that AMD has created a special APU with six Zen 4 cores and discrete graphics based on the RX 7600. So, we can assume that this is not a portable device, but a stationary gaming TV set-top box.

This approach of combining computing units is reminiscent of the Strix Halo concept, where the CPU and GPU are combined in one package. And although Fremont is not yet moving to Zen 5 or RDNA 3.5 architectures, this is not critical for gaming performance. Steam Deck has already shown that the right balance of energy efficiency and optimization can allow less powerful hardware to exceed expectations.

A comparison with the previous generation of Valve gaming devices shows significant progress. Hawk Point — is a significant step up from the Van Gogh chip in Steam Deck OLED. Hawk Point offers 6 cores and 12 threads, which is 50% more than Van Gogh. Clock speeds have also increased significantly: base frequency — 3.2 GHz, boost — to 4.8 GHz. For comparison, Van Gogh operated in the range of 2.4 to 3.5 GHz. This brings the Fremont to a performance level close to the desktop Core i3-13100F.

Geekbench benchmarks also showed almost a twofold performance boost in single and multi-threaded tasks compared to Galileo. The mid-range Ryzen 5 8540U mobile processor, well known in laptops for its combination of performance and energy efficiency, was probably used. At the same time, the Fremont uses Windows 11 Pro, which indicates the status of an engineering sample and not the final characteristics.

Source: videocardz, tomshardware