AMD's latest earnings call has plenty of juicy tidbits to report, but something caught our eye very early on in the opening remarks. According to CEO Dr. Lisa Su, "Valve is on track to begin shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year."
Previously, Valve had stated that the new Steam Machine would release at some point in 2026, but according to the primary supplier of its internal hardware (it uses a semi-custom AMD RDNA 3 GPU with a Zen 4 CPU), we should be seeing it sometime soon.
How early is up for debate, but it looks like it won't be too long until we get one on the bench to test it for ourselves.
Valve's new Steam Machine has caused much excitement here at PC Gamer towers, and for good reason. While the original Steam Machines were something of a misstep, Valve's new cuboid compact gaming PC has some promising internals and a host of design features that we're anxious to put to the test.
One big question we're hoping will be answered soon is the potential price. All of us on the hardware team had a go at guessing the MSRP of Valve's new baby, but that was at a point when the ongoing memory pricing crisis was still in its infancy.
Some of our estimates look a little lowball these days, given that the price of memory is now downright outrageous. Dr. Su made mention of the issue later on in the Q&A segment of the call:
"I think the PC market is an important market. Based on everything that we see today, we're probably seeing the PC TAM (Total Addressable Market) down a bit... given some of the inflationary pressures of the commodities pricing, including memory.
"The way we are modelling the year is, let's call it, second half a bit sub seasonal to first half. Just given everything that we see"
The Steam Machine specs we have so far list it as having 16 GB of system RAM, which seems fairly moderate. Still, like just about all upcoming hardware using a DRAM module at the moment, I'd imagine Valve has had to make some adjustments to its planned MSRP in recent months. It's all to play for, though, and based on these remarks, hopefully we'll be getting our answer soon enough.
