A new leak regarding the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme suggests the upcoming gaming handheld chip will feature eight cores, which would be the same number found in the Z1 Extreme that powers several current gaming handhelds. That would mean no extra cores for new handhelds, but would still mean double the number of cores of the Steam Deck.
The current AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme powers the likes of the Asus ROG Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go, earning them spots on our best handheld gaming PC guide thanks in part to the sheer power of AMD‘s chip. The Z2 Extreme is expected to power the next generation of these devices, so some users might have been expecting an upgrade on its CPU core count.
However, a new leak suggests the chip, which is rumored to be based on AMD’s upcoming powerful gaming laptop Strix Point architecture, will keep its CPU core count at eight cores. The leak comes via regular X-based tech leaker from regular X-based tech leaker @Olrak29_ who cites the shipping manifest website NBD as the source for the below shipping information. In this screenshot, we can see the mention of a “NOTEBOOK Z2X28W” device with a “MICROPROCESSOR (8 CORE).”
We don’t definitively know if this will be the highest-spec version of the Z2 chip, or even if the information is correct at all, but the “X” in the listing suggests it’s the Extreme version rather than the expected lower-powered non-Extreme version of the chip (following on from the AMD Ryzen Z1, which is less powerful than the Extreme version).
While this may seem like disappointing news, though, there’s actually very little reason to be at all concerned about future gaming handhelds not having more CPU power than they already possess with the Z1 Extreme. Quite simply, the number of CPU cores isn’t a limitation for gaming performance on these devices, with it instead being the GPU power that mainly holds back performance, and CPU clock speed to a lesser extent.
We can see evidence of this in the capabilities of the Steam Deck despite its AMD chip only using a quad-core CPU. Plenty of games do run with quite low frame rates on that device, but in nearly all instances it’s the AMD RDNA 2 GPU with eight compute units that holding it back. In comparison, the Z1 Extreme already has an RDNA 3 GPU with 12 compute units, which is why the likes of the ROG Ally can run at higher resolutions than the Steam Deck while maintaining decent performance.
We’re also hoping the Z2 Extreme will have an uprated GPU. AMD’s recently announced Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point chips feature a Radeon 890M GPU with up to 16 compute units, and a handheld chip with the same level of GPU power would be great.
For more on what else we know about AMD’s next generation of gaming handheld CPUs, check out our AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme guide, which summarises both the official and leaked information available so far.