increasing performance for portable console PCs

The Steam Deck did not create the “portable console PC” market. Historians of the sector would want to talk about GPD before him, who created small PCs truly optimized for gaming, or about Ayaneo who believed in the format well before Valve. But it must be admitted that Gabe Newell’s firm popularized it to make it reach the spheres it reaches today.

Now, let’s not forget one thing: the player who really created this market is AMD. By emphasizing the concept of APUs, these chips which integrate CPU and GPU on the same platform, then by riding the wave of SoCs with much more efficient graphics than its competitor Intel, it essentially enabled the creation of portable console PCs. . The Z1 family was just the first step. Today, AMD stands ready to support a second wave with the new Z2 family.

AMD Z2, Z2 Extreme and Z2 Go: technical characteristics

Yes, the founder now has three chips to provide to its manufacturing partners for their next portable consoles. The Z2 Extreme is naturally the most powerful of the lot, as before. A more neutral version, simply Z2, is still there for products looking to be more accessible. But something new is now emerging: the Z2 Go, truly designed to bring prices down.

In order to better determine the capabilities of these chips, here is a comparative table between the different generations of SoC Z by AMD:

What we know at the moment is that the difference is quite minimal. The “compute units”, i.e. the GPU part, remain based on RDNA 3, even if we assume that this is version 3.5 seen on the latest Ryzen AI 300. The Z2 Extreme seems to be a nice development : If the maximum CPU frequency drops slightly, it is not enough to have a real impact. On the other hand, the 4 additional units should provide a nice development.

The most curious is the classic Z2. The latter simply seems to be a Z1 Extreme renamed to become the mid-range of these chips dedicated to portable consoles. AMD being used to this type of practice, we would not be surprised to learn this.

Finally, we have the Z2 Go. This above all sacrifices its CPU part while keeping a GPU part as efficient as a Z1 Extreme. This choice seems much more interesting than the one made on the classic Z1 before, whose GPU part was sacrificed far too much. Depending on the games launched, particularly if we avoid open worlds, the Z2 Go could easily find its place in really interesting portable consoles.

In general, we can see that the Z2 family abandons the slightest idea of ​​holding the 9/10W of TDP. Not surprising considering how the majority of users of products like the ROG Ally or the Lenovo Legion Go never use this mode.

The real interest of the new Z2s?

Now, we must also admit that we do not expect a drastic increase in performance. By having been able to test the 890M graphics part already integrated on the new AMD SoCs dedicated to ultraportables, we were able to have a slight improvement in performance without it being able to justify the purchase of a new console. Even more so when these are sold for around 800 euros generally, at least when they are released.

It is above all on autonomy that we would like to see improvements. However, the TDP seems to remain on the same waters, when battery technologies have not particularly evolved. We just hope that the 80 Wh of the ROG Ally X will become more widely adopted in this market.

Because yes, this new generation will be less an opportunity to update consoles than to allow new players to enter the market or offer alternatives to their most popular product. At least this is what we have already observed in the leaks surrounding CES 2025, and what we expect to observe while walking around the show.