Valve Fremont Spotted In Benchmark Leak, Are Steam Machines Coming Back?

Folks who aren't of a certain vintage may not actually recall that, nearly a decade ago, Valve attempted to launch a home-console-like experience with the "Steam Machines," small form-factor PCs running Linux and meant for living-room PC gaming. The idea didn't pan out because the software compatibility just wasn't there yet; in essence, Valve was too far ahead of its time.

At this point, that's a much smaller problem than it once was thanks to pioneering Proton development done by Valve for its Steam Deck. We also are at a stage where PCs with integrated graphics can realistically play the latest PC games. So saying, the time is ripe for a Steam Machine resurgence, and Valve may indeed be working on just such a project. Steam enthusiast and occasional leaksman SadlyItsBradley (@SadlyItsBradley on Xwitter) spotted a curious entry in the Geekbench database for a "Valve Fremont".


This isn't the first time this name has appeared. We first heard of Fremont way back in December of last year, when some folks on Reddit noticed Valve mucking about in the ChromeOS Embedded Controller driver. The changes seemed to be related to HDMI CEC—pointing to a living-room-oriented device—and the platform of Fremont at that time was given as AMD Lilac.


Lilac is an AMD reference platform that sports a Ryzen 5 8540U SoC. The codename for that chip is "Hawk Point 2". That's a refresh of "Phoenix 2," the smaller cousin of the "Phoenix" SoC used in the ever-popular Ryzen Z1 Extreme as well as many other chips from AMD. Where Phoenix has eight Zen 4 CPU cores and twelve RDNA 3 compute units, Phoenix 2 has just two Zen 4 CPU cores as well as four Zen 4c dense CPU cores, making it a sort-of hybrid CPU. It also packs in just four RDNA 3 compute units. It's a much smaller and lower-power SoC; arguably, it's more suitable for handhelds and tablets.

Given that, it should be no surprise that this new Geekbench leak shows Valve's Fremont utilizing a "Hawk Point 2" processor on the very same FP7 BGA 'socket'. All of the specifications more or less match up with the Ryzen 5 8540U, including the cache allotments and the ~4.8 GHz peak clock rate. This machine only has 8GB of RAM installed, but given the low transfer rate and small capacity, as well as the fact that it's only a 64-bit interface, we suspect this is actually a test or validation platform with one DIMM installed.


That test platform idea makes even more sense in light of the apparent presence of a desktop AMD Radeon RX 7600 graphics card in the test system. The Radeon 740M that we would normally expect to see alongside a "Hawk Point 2" processor is nowhere to be found. Instead, the graphics duties for this system were apparently handled by a desktop Navi 33 part, lending further credence to the 'test bench' idea: someone simply slapped a lightweight GPU in to bring up the system.

So what does this Geekbench result ultimately tell us? Someone at Valve is definitely experimenting with low-power AMD SoCs on a test platform. Other than that? Not much. The implications are pretty interesting, though. It's well known that Valve experimented with various AMD processors well before getting a semi-custom design (that AMD was already making for another client) for the Steam Deck. It's unlikely that the next "Steam Machine" will use a "Hawk Point 2" SoC or Navi 33 graphics, but this does cement the idea that Valve is at least toying with the idea of a new living-room Steam Machine.

_{Hat tip to SadlyItsBradley for pointing out this leak.}