The Steam Deck is undoubtedly enjoying huge success in the handheld gaming PC market, but that hasn’t stopped competitors from attempting to meet its aggressively low price point with devices like the Ayaneo Air Plus using AMD’s ‘Mendocino’ APU. However, benchmarks of an as yet unannounced AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU point to Valve’s custom APU potentially enjoying a somewhat comfortable performance lead.
Referring to results found on Userbenchmark (via Tum_Apisak), the AMD Ryzen 3 7320U bears several similarities to the custom silicon found in the Steam Deck. For instance, both processors boast four cores and eight threads, in addition to a base clock of 2.4GHz. It’s unclear whether it’s also built using the Zen 2 architecture, but this would be surprising given that we expect the Ryzen 7000 series to be primarily made up of Zen 4 CPUs.
Even if AMD builds this new ‘Mendocino’ processor on its newer microarchitecture, it probably won’t come close to matching the Steam Deck in game benchmarks due to its less powerful integrated graphics. The Ryzen 3 7320U only has two RDNA 2 compute units to the eight found in Valve’s handheld, giving the latter a significant advantage.
However, it’s impossible to say how the Ayaneo Air Plus or any other devices using this ‘Mendocino’ APU will fare versus the Steam Deck in any application, let alone gaming. We’ll just have to wait and see when the company eventually unveils what should be its best gaming CPU lineup to date, later this year.