Steam Deck rivals OneXPlayer, Aya, and GPD are planning their revenge with AMD’s 6800U

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

On top of the five weeks it spent at number two, the Steam Deck spent five weeks at number one on Valve's top seller list. The $400-plus machine has captured the attention of those who had been waiting for a portable gaming PC. What about the companies that were already making portable gaming PCs? They have a chance to get revenge.

All of the Steam Deck's chief rivals have confirmed they are building handhelds around the Ryzen 6000. The 6800U has the potential to squash the semi-custom Aerith system at the heart of the steam deck.

Image: GPD

Jack Wong told me in a live interview that the company's R&D team is already working on 6000U chips. GPD has a supply of the 6800U chips it needs, and Cary Golomb just revealed that GPD already has a supply of the Win Max 2.

Since this has been posted on the GPD Discord, seems like it's okay to share now. GPD has them a fresh supply of 6800U.



GPD Win Max 2 6800U test machines should be ready by June!



Unreal and I never would have thought this possible so soon! pic.twitter.com/kVrdwn866g

— Cary Golomb (@carygolomb) May 17, 2022

Last week, Aya announced two portables based on the 6800U, the Aya Neo 2 and the Aya Neo Slide, both of which have a five-row staggered keyboard underneath a sliding screen.

Image: Aya Neo

The Radeon 680M can push out 3.38 Teraflops of raw graphical performance, more than double the 1.6 Teraflops of the Steam Deck on paper, and has 12 RDNA 2 compute units compared to the 8CUs you get with.

Will the laptop chip offer better battery life in a portable, and will that happen in actual games? GPD is trying to make it render at 1920 x 1200 instead of the Steam Deck's 1200 x 800, which could affect the framerate.

Thanks to Notebookcheck, we already have some early performance numbers for the 6800U and 680M graphics in a real laptop, and they are absolutely promising, and, at least when coupled with a faster processor, they can rival a discrete. You can find some videos of those integrated graphics in action here, but be aware that the 6800H is not the same as the 6800U, and is far less thermally constrained than a handheld.

The biggest problem for companies like GPD, Aya, and OneXPlayer is that the Steam Deck has been cheaper and more powerful than anything else. Their handhelds are usually two to three times the price of an entry-level Steam Deck, and they don't have access to the newer RDNA 2 graphics.

Image: OneXPlayer

Wong says the Steam Deck has not been a problem for his company yet, but rather a double-edged sword.

Wong says his company has grown to 100 people and has already sold 50,000 of the handheld gaming PCs in North America, and it is growing faster than the company's previous One Netbook business. Wong says that the company has a large audience in Japan and China, and that his strategy won't be to compete with the Steam Deck on price. He wants to build the best portable PCs.