According to a US report, a meeting between AMD and Microsoft took place at the current IFA, where the hardware manufacturer presented its new CPU/GPU combination Z2 Extreme. The chip is expected to hit the market in early 2025, so development should be completed if devices with it are to be presented at CES next January.
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Despite the commission dispute: Apple relaunches WeChat in ChinaAccording to its own information, Digitaltrends has a generally reliable medium attended this meetingand observed that the main focus of development was battery life. AMD vice president Jack Huynh said that in the Z2’s high-performance mode, a full three hours of runtime can be achieved, instead of the 45 minutes of previous devices.
No information to base the comparison on
However, it is questionable which comparison Huynh is talking about. In our tests, the ROG Ally, along with devices with only small batteries such as the Ally without an X in the name, are limited to less than an hour. And the Steam Deck OLED, which is equipped with a much weaker chip, already achieves almost three hours in Forza 5, also due to the optimized SteamOS and the low display resolution. It is also possible that the AMD manager included image generation via AMFM in his information.
As of now there are only rumors about the build of the Z2 Extreme from another source, namely that it will be based on the Ryzen AI 300 aka Strix Point and may offer up to 12 cores. The latter seems quite unrealistic especially for a gaming handheld, unless AMD is limited to only the more affordable Zen 5c cores. The GPU should have 16 compute units with 1024 arithmetic units (ALUs) with RDNA 3.5 architecture.
Lenovo, ROG – and Valve?
If manufacturers like Lenovo or Asus-ROG want to update their handhelds in 2025, the Z2 Extreme – in whatever form it appears – should be a safe candidate. AMD will have to deliver here as devices with Intel SoCs like the MSI Claw are growing rapidly. Manufacturers, see Asus with the Ally and Ally X, are reluctant to completely change their designs.
And the question of when the new Steam Deck will come out is still completely unclear. In terms of performance, Valve is lagging behind here, but for many the Deck is still considered the best handheld for PC games thanks to SteamOS which runs quite smoothly. So it is not impossible that the Z2 Extreme was kept secret for so long because Valve is planning on it. However, concrete information about new hardware is rarely released in advance from this company.
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