Work is nicely underway on the AMD Ryzen Z2 Excessive chip, which seems set to energy the subsequent era of Asus ROG Ally handhelds and plenty of others. It can compete with Intel’s Lunar Lake chips and is predicated 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 enhance upon a number of sides of efficiency together with higher reminiscence optimization and energy administration.
The most important improve of observe within the Ryzen Z2 will probably be a bigger iGPU, coming with 16 compute models, as a substitute of the 12 within the earlier Phoenix Level cell processors. That’s a a 33% uplift that we might usually anticipate to lead to the same stage 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.
Based on Digital Developments, designers of the subsequent ROG Ally handheld have instructed that demanding video games like Black Fantasy: Wukong will run for nicely 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 once we can anticipate to see the primary AMD Ryzen Z2 Excessive handheld, and whereas indicators level to Asus because the main candidate, its current Ally X launch would possibly sign that it’s too quickly for one more handheld.
As an alternative, we might be taking a look at 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 units have totally different challenges to beat and we acquired our fingers on each at IFA 2024.
