History of video games/Platforms/Steam Deck

Development
The Steam Deck was proceeded by the Steam Machine line of console like home gaming PCs.

Development of the Steam Deck potentially dates back to September 2020.

By May 25th, 2021 reporters at Ars Technica wrote they were able to confirm some rumors that Valve was developing a portable PC codenamed "SteamPal".

The Steam Deck was announced on July 15th, 2021. The Steam Deck was announced several hours before Elgato announced a second version of their Stream Deck, causing some confusion.

The initial release date was intended for sometime in December 2021. By November 2021 logistic and supply challenges would push this date back to Feburary 2022.

Packaging for the console was revealed on December 2nd of 2021.

Launch
Steam Deck was officially released on February 25th of 2022. The console sold well at launch, with production increasing in the post launch period.

Compute
The Steam Deck appears to use a similar architecture to a PC.

The Steam Deck is powered by an AMD Van Gough APU. This APU includes a quad core Zen 2 CPU capable of executing 8 threads. The APU also includes an RDNA2 based GPU sporting 8 GPU compute units with 512 total stream processors. The system is capable of a performance of around 2 teraflops. The system supports ray tracing.

The system has 16 gigabytes of LPDDR5 RAM.

Software


Steam OS is used as the default operating system, though custom operating systems may also be installed.

Games
Unusually for a handheld gaming device, but standard for a PC Valve had no plans for exclusive titles for the Steam Deck.

Aperture Desk Job
Short tech demo game by Valve announced close to launch to demonstrate Steam Deck system features, while also being available for Steam on some other platforms.

External resources

 * Steam Deck website