Handheld gaming: AMD Ryzen Z1 and Ryzen Z1 Extreme officially unveiled

The fact that AMD is launching new APUs for handheld PCs on the market has long been known thanks to the presentation of the Asus ROG Ally. The competition for the Steam Deck will make its debut on 11 May and be the first gaming handheld with the new Ryzen Z1.

The two new APUs Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme are manufactured on the basis of the "Zen 4" architecture using the four-nanometre process. RDNA 3 compute units are responsible for the graphics.

The version used in the Ally handheld utilises a CPU with six cores and twelve threads. In addition, 22 megabytes of cache are available. The graphics performance should deliver up to 2.8 TFLOPS with four compute units (256 shader units). The Extreme variant has eight cores with 16 threads and 24 megabytes of cache on board as well as twelve compute units (768 shader units), which should put up to 8.6 TFLOPS in the hands of future gamers. In terms of RAM, both APUs support LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X with up to 7500 megatransfers per second. The power consumption (TDP) is 15 to 30 watts in each case.

On paper, the Z1 APU achieves a graphics performance that is seven times that of a Nintendo Switch. The Extreme variant even achieves 21.5 times the performance of the Switch. The 8.6 TFLOPS are only 16.5 per cent behind what a Sony Playstation 5 can achieve. And the up to 2.8 TFLOPS from the new ROG handheld corresponds to 1.75 times the performance of the Steam Deck, which achieves up to 1.6 TFLOPS. Whether the specified performance of the two Z1 APUs can be achieved ultimately depends on the cooling and any TDP limitation of the individual gaming handheld.

Despite this, AMD has already provided information on how many FPS the new APUs are expected to deliver in gaming, which should be treated with caution. According to The Verge, the FPS benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen Z1 were carried out with an Asus ROG Ally at 30 watts TDP:

The APUs of the AMD Z1 series are marketed exclusively as "high-performance processors" for handheld consoles. However, as they are based on the AMD Ryzen 7040 series, notebooks will also be able to enjoy the new AMD chips from May.