Newell Talks About ‘Steam Box’

Gabe Newell, founder of Valve, has found some time this year at CES to talk about the much rumored and anticipated ‘Steam Box’, the affectionate pet name given to the Valve-made gaming hardware.  As stated before, this infamous device will be running Linux.  It does seem as if he’s back-pedaled a little bit on what was said in the past. Earlier, it was reported that the box, while running Linux, won’t be as open as one would want, but, according to The Verge and Joystiq he was quoted that “If you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination.”

The alleged device is also going to be packing some pretty awesome guts.  They are working on letting the device serve as a server to host multiple gaming sessions from one device.

“Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simulateneous [sic] game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors – now we’re saying lets expand that a little bit.”