Valve’s Steam Deck has a much better memory than initially suggested

Valve announced its ambitious new laptop platform, the Steam Deck, last week with three distinct models with different technical specifications to choose from. One facet of the three that was standard, however, was the amount of RAM each will ship with, which now looks a lot better than initially thought.

In the original technical specifications, Valve noted that the 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory operated in dual channel, with an expected bandwidth of 5500 MT / s. That last figure is still correct, but Valve has updated the official product page to reflect the fact that the memory is actually four-channel, not dual, providing significantly more bandwidth to the APU powering the device. .

This confirms what some had already suspected when the tech specs were first presented, given that the expected bandwidth compared to the APU powering the Steam Deck didn’t seem to match.

This means that the APU will have a lot more memory bandwidth to use, which is very important given its architecture. An APU is a combination of a CPU and GPU on the same silicon, which means that both share the same pool of memory. This is different from traditional desktops and laptops, where the CPU has exclusive access to your system’s RAM (usually dual channel DDR4 memory) while your GPU has its own memory which is usually much faster. and contains much greater bandwidth (most GPUs ship with GDDR6 or GDDR6X memory today).

In the case of the Steam Deck, having more memory bandwidth means better allocation shared between GPU and CPU, which means better performance when gaming. Nothing has changed since Valve opened pre-orders for the Steam Deck, but at least now you can rest assured that you’re getting what’s pretty standard for this type of setup.