No? They couldn’t have made it more powerful.
That is to say, they could’ve used the Z1 Extreme if they wanted to. Zen 4 and RDNA3 iirc? But that uses much more power and is worse at the Steam Deck’s power target. And surely costs a lot more.
As Valve has said, there exists no chip that’s as powerful at the Deck’s target TDP. And possibly target cost, too. Maybe an Apple chip or whatever, but nothing Valve is actually able to use.
The best they could do was get a refreshed version of what they already had that’s slightly more power efficient. So maybe you could say it is incrementally more powerful?
It’s pretty clear that the Steam Deck is strategically important to Valve, and they’re willing to update it as fast as they can, unlike the Index, even for a small (but meaningful) refresh.
If they had it by now, I’m sure they really would’ve given the upgrade to all the users. But AMD has no such chip. Nothing that matches Valve’s needs.
Unfortunately they don’t sell their new version in the US.
So instead of maybe getting a Fairphone 5 as a backup phone, I bought a super cheap Pixel 7a with the Black Friday sale.