Work is well underway on the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, which looks set to power the next generation of Asus ROG Ally handhelds and many others. The new CPU will pick up from the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which is currently used in several top-end handheld devices, including the Lenovo Legion Go.
AMD CPUs already power some of the best handheld gaming PC devices, including Valve’s Steam Deck, which uses a quad-core Zen 3 CPU. However, it’s the Z1 Extreme (and its weaker non-Extreme sibling) that has ended up inside the more powerful handhelds available right now, including the Asus ROG Ally X.
According to a report from Digital Trends, AMD confirmed that it’s working on the new Ryzen Z2 Extreme at a Q&A session with Microsoft, with the company saying it’s expected to come out in early 2025. Other details are thin on the ground, but we can take some pointers from AMD’s other recently released chips.
For example, AMD’s Ryzen AI 300-series Strix Point CPUs feature an AMD Radeon 890M based on the RDNA 3.5 architecture, which can feature up to 16 compute units. That’s four more compute units than the 12 featured in AMD’s Phoenix Point Ryzen Z1 Extreme and gives the GPU 1,024 stream processors.
It’s possible that the new chips could also support AMD FSR 4, as the company has hinted at large improvements to power efficiency and battery life for handhelds that come from the tech. AMD’s Jack Hunyh says FSR 4 is going to be based on AI, rather than filtering, which means it could take advantage of AMD’s new NPU hardware.
Meanwhile, other leaks point to the number of Ryzen Z2 Extreme cores standing at eight, which is the same maximum number found in the Z1 Extreme, and will be fine for gaming.
With AMD targeting early 2025 for a release, the recent release of the Asus ROG Ally X release might signal that it’s too soon for yet another Ally handheld. However, we could be looking at an update to the Lenovo Legion Go, or AMD could even be working with Valve on the Steam Deck 2. Given the relative lack of CPU and GPU power in the Steam Deck, a new superpowered Steam Deck could beat its competitors to the punch with AMD’s newest chip powering it.
For more handheld updates, check out our hands-on previews for both the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and Acer Nitro Blaze 7. Both devices have different challenges to overcome and we got our hands on both of them at IFA 2024.