STEAM DECK NEWS – It wouldn’t be surprising if the next generation Steam Deck (which will be made one day) will be based on this technology…

Regarding the AMD Ryzen Z2 APU (Accelerated Processor Unit = processor and graphics chip on the same circuit), Golden Pic Upgrade, a Chinese insider has leaked and clarified. On a Chinese platform, Bilibili, they reported what configuration AMD’s top model could have in the next generation of handheld PCs (as Asus ROG Ally, Steam Deck and Lenovo Legion Go have all chosen AMD; MSI has pacted with Intel).

According to them, the Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU will be a 3+5 core configuration, with 3 Zen 5 cores and 5 Zen 5C cores, allowing AMD to maximize performance and power efficiency. The AMD Ryzen AI 7 Pro 360 has a similar CPU configuration and can clock up to 5GHz with power consumption between 9W and 30W. On the graphics side, there will be 16 compute units (CU) on the RDNA 3.5 architecture. This will only be surpassed by the AMD Strix Halo (40 CU). The graphics chip could be the Radeon 890M seen in the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 APU.

The top-end AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU will arrive in 2025, and the regular Z2 and Z2G versions will be more mainstream and entry-level. AMD will use them to compete with Intel’s Core Ultra 200V Unar Lake and Core Ultra 200U (Arrow Lake) solutions found in handheld PCs. Lunar Lake has Xe2 cores and is capable of good performance per watt, so AMD will have its work cut out for it.

And how does all this relate to the Steam Deck? We wrote about Valve’s device a few days ago that the company won’t be doing minimal updates every year, so the next generation model will only be released if they see a significant performance improvement in the technology. And the Ryzen Z2 Extreme could be considered as such, right?

Source: WCCFTech, Bilibili