Valve might be gearing up for its next big piece of gaming hardware, codenamed Fremont, and early benchmark leaks give us a first detailed picture of what's inside. The system showed up on Geekbench with a custom AMD chip (Hawk Point 2 family), built on the Zen 4 architecture and produced on a 4 nm process. It looks to feature 6 cores and 12 threads running at 3.2 GHz base clock with boost frequency up to 4.8 GHz. On the memory side, the chip carries 16 MB of L3 cache and 6 MB of L2 cache. Graphics power comes from a Radeon RX 7000-series GPU (RDNA 3), likely offering a big step up from the Steam Deck's older RDNA 2 setup.

In Geekbench 6, Fremont scored 2412 points in single-core and 7451 points in multicore. Interestingly, the tested unit only had 8 GB RAM (DDR5-5600), less than the Steam Deck's 16 GB LPDDR5, yet still nearly doubled performance thanks to the newer architecture. For context, the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED use a Zen 2-based chip with 4 cores, 8 threads, base 2.8 GHz, boost 3.5 GHz, plus just 4 MB L3 and 2 MB L2 cache. Comparing the two, Fremont's CPU alone looks like a massive leap forward. The GPU bump from 8 compute units of RDNA 2 to an RX 7600-level RDNA 3 design is also significant.While some rumors suggested Valve might refresh its handheld with an "Aerith Plus" chip, the evidence points elsewhere. Fremont seems designed more like a console than a handheld, possibly tied to a new wave of SteamOS-based living room devices.

If these specs hold, Valve's Fremont could deliver a console-class experience with far stronger CPU and GPU performance than the Steam Deck. All eyes are now on Valve for an official reveal.