Earlier, there were reports of a leak indicating that the upcoming Asus handheld gaming PC, the ROG Ally, would be powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Series processor. At that time, the authenticity of the leak was uncertain. However, AMD has now confirmed that the information is indeed accurate.
According to The Verge, yesterday AMD officially announced the AMD Ryzen Z1 and Ryzen Z1 Extreme, a pair of 4nm processors created specifically for handheld gaming PCs.
The Ryzen Z1 Extreme features a combination of 8 Zen 4 CPU cores and 16 threads, along with 12 RDNA 3 graphics cores and a cache of 24MB. It guarantees an impressive raw graphics performance of up to 8.6 teraflops (TFLOPS), which is much closer to the Sony PS5’s 10.28 TFLOPS than the Steam Deck’s 1.6 TFLOPS.
In contrast, the regular Ryzen Z1 processor comes with 6 CPU cores and 12 threads, 4 GPU cores, and a cache of 22MB. But it’s still more powerful than the chip inside Steam Deck.
According to AMD, if you play certain games on a Z1 Extreme at 720p with low graphics settings, you can achieve over 60 frames per second (FPS), which can be upscaled to 1080p using AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) technology.
On the regular Z1, at the same settings and resolution, the games are still running at a very good FPS. According to AMD senior technical marketing manager Don Woligroski:
I think what’s going on here: it’s not the CUs (compute units) that are the limiting factor, it’s the LPDDR5. The fast memory is, a lot of these cases, what these games are really hungry for.
Here are the benchmarks for games running 1080p natively at low settings on both Z1 processors.
Woligroski said all these benchmarks were carried out on an “advanced engineering sample” of the Asus ROG Ally and they ran using the Ally’s “Turbo Mode” in which the processor’s power draw can reach up to 30 watts, depending on the game being played.
Besides that, AMD has indicated that the Z1 and Z1 Extreme processors are currently exclusive to Asus but has left the possibility open for other partners to use the Z series chips in the future. Furthermore, AMD has mentioned that Asus will reveal the pricing for the ROG Ally and provide additional information about availability on 11 May 2023.
