AMD Reveals Next-Gen Handheld Gaming PC Chips (ign.com) 15
At CES 2025, AMD unveiled the Z2, Z2 Go, and Z2 Extreme chipsets -- all powered by Zen 5 CPU cores and designed for handheld gaming PCs. IGN reports: The AMD Zen 2 Extreme, along with lower-specced cousins the Z2 and Z2 Go, are powered by Zen 5 CPU cores. While the Zen 2 Extreme is using a RDNA 3.5-based GPU, the Z2 and Z2 Go are still using RDNA 3 and RDNA 2, respectively. This creates an entire family of APUs (Advanced Processing Units) for handheld gaming PCs that should hopefully cause the price of handhelds to go down a bit.
With the Z2 Extreme, AMD is hoping to dramatically improve battery life, while also delivering console-like gaming performance to devices like the Lenovo Legion Go. By and large, the biggest limiting factor of these handhelds, especially at the high end, is how quickly their batteries drain when playing demanding games away from a wall outlet. The company also introduced the "Fire Range" HX3D processors for gaming laptops, leveraging 3D V-cache technology for enhanced gaming performance and efficiency. "All of these mobile chipsets, from 'Fire Range' HX3D to the AMD Z2 Extreme, will end up in gaming laptops and handhelds over the next few months," adds IGN.
AMD published a press release with additional details and specifications.
With the Z2 Extreme, AMD is hoping to dramatically improve battery life, while also delivering console-like gaming performance to devices like the Lenovo Legion Go. By and large, the biggest limiting factor of these handhelds, especially at the high end, is how quickly their batteries drain when playing demanding games away from a wall outlet. The company also introduced the "Fire Range" HX3D processors for gaming laptops, leveraging 3D V-cache technology for enhanced gaming performance and efficiency. "All of these mobile chipsets, from 'Fire Range' HX3D to the AMD Z2 Extreme, will end up in gaming laptops and handhelds over the next few months," adds IGN.
AMD published a press release with additional details and specifications.
Steam deck's legacy (Score:3)
So there's been a lot, and I do mean A LOT of releases of handheld gaming PCs. Everything from Steam Deck style "screen with joysticks on the sides" to mini-laptops, to recently announced weird combo where it's a mini-laptop style thingy, but you can take the keyboard out and under it are joysticks and a touchscreen keyboard. And all but one (MSI variant) seem to be using AMD's chips, specifically because of better power efficiency and better iGPU.
Going to be interesting to see if Steam Deck refresh is coming with this new chip. Because competitors are most certainly going to be releasing refreshes of their existing systems in droves.
But the main block in those things is less the battery on the go, and more the really crappy performance of the iGPU. You're still stuck playing on low settings in fairly old games. It would be really nice if AMD released a version with just several times more GPU cores and maybe more memory bandwidth. Yes the battery will drain faster, but you could sell a physically a bit bigger device with bigger battery that could run actual modern games at 60fps on medium or better settings. This is really noticeable in how a lot of new releases of these gaming thingies are coming with 8" or so screens instead of Steam Deck style 7". And that means more space inside the device for everything else.
Headline grammar getting worse (Score:3)
I don't always read TFS but the grammar in the headlines is worse in 2025.
It's "An MD", and I don't know why a story about a doctor's opinion that some snacks are Politically Correct is relevant on a nerd website. People do eat them even when they are not gaming.
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I don't always read TFS but the grammar in the headlines is worse in 2025.
It's "An MD", and I don't know why a story about a doctor's opinion that some snacks are Politically Correct is relevant on a nerd website. People do eat them even when they are not gaming.
Dude, you totally misread that. It's about a Doctor recommending that only gamers eat these politically correct chips. I haven't bothered reading past the title either, but I could totally get behind a doctor recommended chip that's politically correct for the modern age. I'm just having trouble understanding how the chips are politically correct. Are the potatoes raised with fluid gender identity? Are all breeds of potatoes included in the chip making process? I would think it would be difficult to fry or
Don't use them for games (Score:3)
Instead build embodied AIs that accompany a person.
The local AI can analyse voice and vision locally and use cloud AI resources where feasible.
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XXX=Clippy was a great insult in its time, when aimed at too-smart-by-half software. But it's now past its use-by date now.
ChatGPT's not Clippy. :-)
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99% of people are already wearing a device with them with a microphone, camera and high speed internet connection making cloud feasible almost all of the time. The thing with good modern AI models is that they take a lot of compute which takes a lot of battery, which is not great for on-the-go usage.
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AI doesn't run well on general purpose GPUs - which is all this is. There's a reason why GPU and CPU vendors are adding dedicated compute units to their products.
These won't be anywhere near as useful for your local voice assistant as dedicated hardware (inbuilt to CPU or GPU for that matter) would be, and none of these devices seem to be targeting the compute market
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Instead build embodied AIs that accompany a person.
The local AI can analyse voice and vision locally and use cloud AI resources where feasible.
Because we all need more tech in our shit constantly? I'm fed up enough with my phone dinging randomly because some yahoo wants me to upgrade my car warranty or get me to take out a loan. Do I really need AI popping into my ear every few seconds to say, "Watch that lady at the left corner, she looks suspicious. She only has four fingers and a thumb on that right hand!"
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"Watch that lady at the left corner, she looks suspicious. She only has four fingers and a thumb on that right hand!"
Haha -- and that's not even accounting for the hallucinations!
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The idea of an AI or LLM controlled exclusively, and working exclusively, for me -- not OpenAI/Google/Facebook/Amazon/RandomCo -- is appealing.
Ambiguous naming convention (Score:4, Interesting)
Why call it Z2 when it's using cores from Zen5? Previous handheld-oriented SoCs (such as the one in Steam Deck) use Zen2 cores.
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Competition. AMD and Intel are neck in neck to see who has the worst marketing department.
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I though Intel was way ahead by end of last year... oh wait, that was their PR department.
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It's easy, man. Z2 is built on Zen5. Z3 will be built on ZenX. They would say Zen10, but then it looks too much like Zen1.0, which would REALLY confuse people.