AMD has announced its next-gen Ryzen Z2 APU lineup for gaming handhelds, which will come in Z2 Extreme, Z2, and Z2 Go flavors.
AMD's Next-Gen Z2 APUs For Gaming Handhelds Will Cater To All Kinds of Platforms: Z2 Extreme, Z2 Standard & Z2 Go Announced
Following the success of its Z1 series APUs, AMD is now going to introduce its next-gen Z2 SOCs for gaming handhelds, which will cover the entire portable segment from entry-level platforms to high-end configurations.
As of today's announcement, AMD revealed its commitment to bringing console-class gaming to handhelds with several hours of unplugged gameplay, all the while featuring maximum gaming fidelity using its diverse range of gaming technologies, such as FSR. AMD's Z1 SoCs were adopted within some of the industry's biggest portable handhelds such as the ASUS Rog Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and Valve's Steam Deck.
AMD's goal with its Z2 APUs is to significantly increase its TAM while offering more products to the market. These gaming handhelds will offer improved battery timing, better software support, and performance leadership compared to their rivals.
For today's launch, there are a total of three brand-new SoCs being announced within the AMD Z2 stack. These include:
AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme
The AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme is going to be the ultimate gaming handheld APU with a total of 8 cores and 16 threads. The chip will boast a maximum boost clock of 5.0 GHz, 24 MB of cache, a TDP of 15 to 35W, and 16 RDNA 3.5 iGPU cores. This chip is based on the Strix die and will be the first true SoC for handhelds with the Zen 5 core architecture.
AMD Ryzen Z2
The standard AMD Ryzen Z2 will feature 8 cores and 16 threads based on the Zen 4 architecture, a maximum boost clock of 5.1 GHz, 24 MB cache, a TDP of 15-30W and 12 compute units based on the RDNA 3 core architecture. The Ryzen Z2 SoC is based on the Hawk Point refresh architecture & offers around 16 TOPS of NPU performance. This is a slight uptick over the Phoenix SoCs that were featured in the Z1 lineup.
AMD Ryzen Z2 Go
And lastly, we have the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go, which is an entry-level APU based on the Rembrandt die and packs just 4 cores with 8 threads, based on the Zen 3 architecture. This chip will feature a max boost clock of up to 4.3 GHz, 10 MB of cache, a 15-30W cTDP, and 12 iGPU cores based on the RDNA 2 architecture.
AMD states that the first AMD Ryzen Z2 APUs will be released in Q1 2025, which is when we can expect the first iteration of handhelds on the market.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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