AMD chips just for handheld consoles

Ryzen Z1. © Advanced Micro Devices.

In the wake of Valve’s successful launch of Steam Deck featuring a custom-designed AMD SoC that combines a Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU cores, AMD has announced two new chips, Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme, expressly for the handheld game console market. The Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme combine 6 or 8 CPU cores based on Zen 4, respectively, with 4 or 12 GPU cores based on RDNA 3, and use a 4 nm manufacturing process. AMD says the Ryzen Z1 can run games about 55% faster than on the Steam Deck. The specs of the Z1 chips appear similar to the upcoming Ryzen 7000U processors aimed at Ultrabooks and thin-and-light gaming laptops. These Z1 chips will likely spawn a whole slew of Steam Deck competitors. The first manufacturer to launch is Asus, which announced on April 1 (an unfortunate marketing decision for an otherwise very real product) the release of the ROG Ally console, equipped with a Ryzen Z1, a 7-inch, 1080p 120Hz screen, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Though its chip is slower, Valve still has a slight competitive edge thanks to its SteamOS, which is optimized for handhelds. Its competitors will run on Windows, which, unless Microsoft finally does its research, is less ergonomic for this kind of device.

⇨ Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham, “AMD’s Ryzen Z1 chips could power a new wave of handheld Steam Deck clones.”

2023-04-25