Work is effectively underway on the AMD Ryzen Z2 Excessive chip, which seems to be set to energy the subsequent era of Asus ROG Ally handhelds and plenty of others. It’ll compete with Intel’s Lunar Lake chips and relies on the Strix Level structure.
AMD already powers a few of the finest handheld gaming PCs, together with Valve’s Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally X, however this new chip seems to be to enhance upon a number of aspects of efficiency together with higher reminiscence optimization and energy administration.
The most important improve of observe within the Ryzen Z2 can be a bigger iGPU, coming with 16 compute items, as a substitute of the 12 within the earlier Phoenix Level cell processors. That’s a a 33% uplift that we’d typically anticipate to lead to an identical degree of efficiency gaming enchancment.
By way of graphical structure, the Ryzen Z2 will use RDNA 3.5, which improves upon the RDNA 3 within the Ryzen Z1 Excessive, although notably isn’t as a lot of a step up because the model new RDNA 4 structure we’re anticipating to energy AMD’s subsequent era of desktop GPUs. Nonetheless, the newer chip structure as a complete permits improved battery effectivity when gaming in addition to higher optimization with LPDDR5 reminiscence.
In keeping with Digital Traits, designers of the subsequent ROG Ally handheld have prompt that demanding video games like Black Delusion: Wukong will run for effectively over an hour, one thing not potential on the Ally X, regardless of its 80Wh battery.
In the identical report, it’s stated that AMD is concentrating on early 2025 for a launch. That is seemingly after we can anticipate to see the primary AMD Ryzen Z2 Excessive handheld, and whereas indicators level to Asus because the main candidate, its latest Ally X launch may sign that it’s too quickly for one more handheld.
As an alternative, we might be an replace to the Lenovo Legion Go, or extra surprisingly, AMD might be working with Valve on the Steam Deck 2. Given how underpowered its present handhelds are, it wouldn’t be a shock to see a brand new superpowered Steam Deck beat its opponents to the punch and launch with AMD’s latest chip powering it.
For extra handheld updates, take a look at our hands-on previews for each the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and Acer Nitro Blaze 7. Each gadgets have totally different challenges to beat and we received our palms on each at IFA 2024.
