An AMD engineering sample codenamed Gainsborough has turned up in the OpenBenchmarking database, and it's being talked about as a possible Steam Deck 2 chip. This is a leak, not an announcement. Neither Valve nor AMD has said anything about Gainsborough, and there's no pricing or release info.
The listing shows a six-core, 12-thread processor at 2.4 GHz on an AMD development board labeled GBR-FF6-SKT, with 24GB of LPDDR5 at 9,600 MT/s. For comparison, the Steam Deck OLED has four cores, eight threads and 16GB of LPDDR5-6400. The integrated GPU reports a 2,400 MHz clock, but its architecture and compute unit count aren't listed. Notebookcheck says the CPU's microcode revision points to a Zen 6-family design, though that isn't confirmed.
The name is the main Steam Deck link. The original Deck's chip was called Aerith, after Final Fantasy VII's Aerith Gainsborough, and the Deck OLED's is Sephiroth. That said, Notebookcheck notes leakers have also tied the FF6 package to AMD's Ryzen Z3 handheld chips, and VideoCardz says this sample could be a future Ryzen Z3 variant rather than the actual Steam Deck 2 chip.
The early GPU numbers aren't a big jump. VideoCardz compared it with a July 2026 Steam Deck OLED run in GpuTest: Gainsborough scored 3,508 in FurMark, about 5.6% above the Deck OLED's 3,323. It also led in Plot3D and PixMark Volplosion but trailed in GiMark. Gainsborough ran at 1024 × 768 in a window, while the Deck ran fullscreen at 1280 × 800, so the scores aren't directly comparable. It's also an engineering sample on development drivers with unknown power limits, running synthetic OpenGL tests instead of games.