Valve's upcoming Steam Deck hand-held PC system is the talk of the town at the moment, especially now people are starting to look more closely under the hood. One of the key talking points for the device is the hardware spec that Valve have put in the Steam Deck. However, the company has allegedly updated the spec sheet as new information surfaces that it doesn't contain exactly what was originally advertised.
According to a recent report, a Twitter user who goes by the handle Locuza noticed that the original listing for the Steam Deck showed that the memory was dual-channel LPDDR5. However, they noticed that there had been an update, and it now states that the hand-held device will have quad-channel RAM instead, which should make it a faster machine all round.
As people begin to discuss the nuances of the new Valve gaming tech, such as the news that the Steam Deck will fully support mods similar to a home PC, this is a curious one, as it suggests that either the listing was originally wrong, or there's been a slight change at the manufacturing level. Either way, as it stands, it looks as though the interior will have a speedier RAM setup than previously thought. Whatever the reason, it looks as though it will be an improvement, however small it may seem, on what people originally thought it was going to be.
While it doesn't sound like a huge difference initially, what's happened here is Valve is now saying the Deck's memory has twice as many channels. As the device, which is already under scrutiny given that the cheapest Steam Deck model may already be slower than anticipated, uses the same chip for both the CPU and GPU, they are, essentially fighting over two memory channels. Upping this to quad-channel means processes can be shared more efficiently, effectively giving the Steam Deck higher performance, at least as far as RAM is concerned.
For anyone who has yet to read up on it, the Steam Deck was announced by Valve a week ago, and is essentially a hand-held PC. Where it differs from something like, say, the Nintendo Switch, is that it functions in the same way as a regular PC. This means gamers can load up games from their Steam library using the device and play them as they would normally. It's also able to support Windows if users decide they don't want to use the Steam OS that it comes pre-loaded with.
The Steam Deck is due for release this December.
