Summary
AMDhas finally confirmed a release window for the Z2 Extreme chipset. The successor toAMD’shighly popular Z1 Extreme APU is tipped to make its way to consumers next year, bringing with it substantial improvements to performance and battery life.
Launched in summer 2023, the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme has quickly gained prominence in the handheld gaming PC space thanks to its exceptional performance capabilities in a portable form factor. The Z1 Extreme is built on AMD’s Zen 4 and RDNA 3 architectures and boasts a theoretical maximum of 8.6 teraflops on the GPU side, making it more powerful than a PS4 Pro. Naturally, then, the Z1 Extreme became a popular choice to power some of thebest handheld gaming PCson the market, such as the Asus ROG Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go.
However, power consumption has been one of the biggest criticisms leveled at the Z1 Extreme. TheSteam Deck’s custom AMD Van Gogh chipis no doubt less powerful than the Z1 Extreme, but comfortably pulls ahead in most cases when it comes to battery life. The Valve handheld’s lead may not last very long, though, asDigital Trends reportsthat AMD confirmed an early 2025 release target for the Z2 Extreme APU during a joint Q&A session with Microsoft at IFA 2024. No performance benchmarks or estimates were provided at the event, though, with more details about the Z2 Extreme speculated to arrive early next year.
AMD Hints at Huge Battery Life Gains for the Z2 Extreme
The Z2 Extreme is rumored to be utilizingAMD’s latest Strix Point architecture, so it’ll almost certainly offer a marked improvement in performance and battery life over the Z1 Extreme. However, an intriguing comment from AMD’s senior vice president of Computing and Graphics, Jack Huynh, hints at battery life being a bigger focus for the Z2 Extreme. Huynh remarked during the Q&A about wanting to playBlack Myth: Wukongfor three hours on a handheld, rather than the 45 minutes that the current crop of portable gaming PCs can manage. This may imply that the Z2 Extreme more than triples the Z1 Extreme’s battery life.
The implication sounds ambitious, but if AMD can pull it off, the Z2 Extreme will hands-down be the most performant and efficient handheld PC chipset when it launches next year. AMD said that it’s currently working on the Z2 Extreme with several partners, which possibly alludes to refreshed handhelds from Asus and Lenovo that sport the next-gen APU. It should also be interesting to see if Valve is considering the Z2 Extreme for a Steam Deck successor. The company previously stated that it’llstart development on Steam Deck 2when hardware takes a substantial leap forward, which might just be heralded by the Z2 Extreme’s arrival.
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X desktop CPU is the top-of-the-line offering in the latest Ryzen 9000 series of processors. It comes with 16 cores, 32 threads, and a boost clock speed of 5.7 GHz. The CPU has 64MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 170W. It delivers considerably higher multi-core and single-core performance than the Ryzen 9 7950X at the same power draw, which is a testament to its efficiency and IPC count gain claims.
