AMD is reportedly cooking up a new gaming handheld CPU that has over twice the power of the existing Steam Deck chip. According to the latest leak, the new AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme features eight cores based on the latest Zen 5 CPU architecture, and it also has an unexpectedly powerful Radeon GPU in it. This wouldn’t just be great for the Steam Deck 2, but also other handhelds, such as the next Asus ROG Ally.
The existence of the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme has been known for a while now, but AMD hasn’t released any details about the specs yet. If this latest rumor is true, though, then this chip is very likely to be used in the best handheld gaming PC devices of the future, perhaps even the Steam Deck 2.
This latest rumor comes from regular tech leaker Golden Pig Upgrade on the Bilibili forums in China, and apparently gives us the core configuration for the new CPU, as well as the spec of the integrated GPU. As always with rumors, however, bear in mind that none of this has been officially confirmed by AMD, so take it with a grain of salt for the moment.
The leaker originally stated that AMD’s new top-end handheld gaming CPU was called the Z2 Extreme X, and that it had been canceled. However, a quick follow-up post suggested that the “X” at the end of this particular CPU’s name was erroneous and that the top-end chip would be called the Z2 Extreme, without the X, coming with “3+5” CPU cores and a “16CU RDNA3.5” GPU.
Let’s start with the GPU, as this is the part that will really impact gaming performance. If this rumor is true, it signals that this new chip will have 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units (CUs), giving it 1,024 stream processors. That’s not only twice the number in the Steam Deck’s Van Gogh GPU, but it’s also based on AMD’s latest RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture, which offers superior performance to the RDNA 2 architecture in the Steam Deck GPU.
Meanwhile, the CPU looks like it’s going to have a total of eight cores. That’s already a headstart on the four cores inside the Steam Deck CPU. The 3+5 wording very likely signals that this chip will have a similar structure to AMD’s Strix Point mobile chips, which contain a mix of full-fat Zen 5 cores, as well as compact Zen 5c (compact) cores. If this rumor is true, then the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme has three Zen 5 cores and five Zen 5c cores.
This structure is quite different from Intel’s P-Cores and E-Cores, where the latter are based on a different architecture from the former and have a significantly cut-down spec. With Zen 5c, AMD’s main objective is reducing the physical size of the cores, rather than reducing their performance and power draw. AMD says its Zen 5c cores are 25% smaller than Zen 5 cores, but they still have the same feature set and core architecture as the full-fat cores, just with a denser die and less cache.
If this rumor is true, not only is this new chip significantly more powerful than the one in the Steam Deck, but it’s also a good step up from the Ryzen Z1 Extreme used in the Asus ROG Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go, which has eight last-gen Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA 3 compute units in its GPU, giving it 768 stream processors.
In the meantime, there’s still plenty of fun to be had with today’s handheld devices, and you can check out our guide to the best Steam Deck games to see our top picks, all of which have been tried and tested on the Steam Deck to make sure they run smoothly.