A new AMD Gainsborough APU, which has been identified as a potential candidate for the Valve Steam Deck 2, has apparently been leaked onOpenBenchmarking. The new engineering sample shows a total of six cores and twelve threads on the CPU, an increase of 50% over the current Steam Deck APU, and a base clock of 2.4 GHz.

Another notable change from the original Steam Deck is that the Gainsborough APU in question has 24 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, instead of 16. That memory was also running at a whopping 9600 MT/s, as opposed to the Steam Deck's 6400 MT/s. This isn't necessarily to say that the Steam Deck 2 will have 24 GB of memory, but it's an indication that AMD, Valve, or some other OEM is testing that configuration. In the benchmark results, the APU reaches 3,508 points in Furmark. While it's not directly comparable, since the Gainsburough APU was running at 1024 × 768 the Valve Steam Deck achieved 3,323 in Furmark at 1280 × 800. Those two results are close, especially given the higher resolution in the Steam Deck testing, but if this is on early drivers, it's a good sign for GPU performance on the Steam Deck 2.It seems as though AMD will be using Zen 6 or Zen 6c in the Gainsburough APU, although it's unclear what the mix of Zen 6 and 6c cores will be. There is even a possibility that AMD will use the Zen 6 LP cores recently detailed in relation to the PlayStation 6 handheld. It was previously also reported that the Steam Deck would be ditching the custom AMD silicon for a semi-custom part or an off-the-shelf component, which means the Gainsborough APU may eventually make its way to systems other than the Steam Deck 2.