AMD announces more powerful Ryzen Z2 Series processors for future PC handhelds, but Valve says 'there is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck'

AMD has confirmed that Valve will be using one of its new handheld gaming PC processors, the Ryzen Z2 Series, inside a future model of Steam Deck.

During a CES 2025 call, an AMD spokesperson said: "You'll see this [Z2 Series] coming to market from a number of partners, the Legion Go, the ROG Ally, the Valve Steam Deck."

"This really allows us to tap into what we see as an exciting and fast growing portion of the market where many of our OEM partners are bringing some really cool and high powered handheld solutions to market and delivering great battery life and performance. And an overall fantastic handheld gaming experience on the AMD Z2 series processors."

However, Valve has flatly denied that there is a Z2 Steam Deck in development. In a post on Bluesky, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais wrote "There is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck. Guessing the slide was meant to say the series is meant for products like that, not announcing anything specific."

The Z2 Series is a new lineup of APUs—processors with both CPU and GPU components included. It includes three chips:

The Extreme version will be using RDNA 3 graphics, likely RDNA 3.5, and none will use the latest RDNA 4 architecture also announced at CES. The Extreme chip will also likely use the modern Zen 5 architecture, while at least the lowest tier chip is likely based on older architectures (boo), but neither of these was confirmed at the show.

This isn't a dissimilar approach to one taken by AMD with the Z1 series, which offered up both the Z1 Extreme and the Z1. The Z1 ultimately proved to be the much more popular chip in handhelds such as the ROG Ally, at least by our reckoning, as the Z1 version didn't offer the performance or price drop we'd like to see to make it worthwhile.

What this means for Valve and other handheld gaming PC manufacturers, including Lenovo and Asus, is they'll have their pick between these chips for their next design of handheld gaming PC. If Valve does later decide to create a Steam Deck with this hardware, for example, it could pick the Ryzen Z2 Go, as the company's current Steam Deck is a more price-conscious design than the ROG Ally or Legion Go.

Though it might also need a bigger performance leap than the Z2 Go can offer to justify a new model, as we'll get to shortly. Meanwhile, Lenovo and ROG are likely to opt for the highest performance option, at least for their top-spec model.

Lenovo has been long-rumoured to redesign its Legion handheld lineup to include these Z2 processors, and a mix of them, too. We know Lenovo will also have an event covering the "future of handheld gaming" tomorrow, January 7, with Valve as a special guest. Wonder what that could be about, huh? Oh right, maybe a Legion Go with SteamOS.

That's a point, actually. With Lenovo and Asus looking likely to bring SteamOS to their handheld gaming PCs, which have traditionally run Windows, then these devices become something more like a powerful Steam Deck. When Valve eventually upgrades its hardware, too, we'll end up with lots of SteamOS-powered handhelds running similar or the same processors. That's a lot of competition in the space.

However, we don't know when Valve intends to release a device with the Z2 processor inside it. The company has been pretty uptight about only creating a next-generation Steam Deck when there's a "generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life."

We don't know how the Z2 Series will exactly shape up, but the Extreme version appears likely to be a match for the RDNA 3.5 GPU included in AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. To call that a generational leap does feel like a bit of a stretch if you've been keeping up with the latest trends, but the Steam Deck is on much older technology—a four-core Zen 2 processor with eight RDNA 2 CUs.

Though, say Valve picks the Z2 Go, that would be only a four CU improvement on the current Steam Deck APU, and the Go is likely not using the latest Zen 5 architecture either. Not only that, but the Z1 Extreme would've been better, so why wait?

It's all a bit odd. Before Valve's public denial I wondered if AMD has suggested something that's not entirely the case re: the Steam Deck and Z2 availability, but the AMD spokesperson was pretty clear about it in the call and there's a picture of a Steam Deck right there in the slides—which Valve must not be too happy about, given it's now publicly denied using the hardware.

AMD says Z2 Series availability will begin in Q1, 2025. We'll have to wait and see what Lenovo has in store tomorrow and whether Valve has anything more to say on a future Steam Deck to see what this all means for the handheld market. One thing is for sure, it's showing no signs of slowing.