Leaked Gainsborough APU shows 50% more CPU cores for Steam Deck 2

Leaked benchmarks on OpenBenchmarking suggest the AMD Gainsborough APU may be a candidate for the Valve Steam Deck 2. The engineering sample shows a CPU with six cores and 12 threads, which is 50% more than the current Steam Deck APU. This chip has a 2.4 GHz base clock.

The leak also shows the APU running with 24 GB of LPDDR5 RAM at 9600 MT/s. While this indicates testing for that configuration, it is not confirmed that the Steam Deck 2 will use 24 GB of memory. In a Furmark test, the Gainsborough APU reached 3,508 points at 1024 x 768. For comparison, the current Steam Deck achieved 3,323 points at 1280 x 800.

Reports say the Gainsborough APU might use Zen 6 or Zen 6c cores, though the specific mix of cores is unclear. There is a possibility AMD uses Zen 6 LP cores. If Valve moves to semi-custom or off-the-shelf components for the next handheld, this APU could be used in other systems.