The next generation of handhelds has the potential to be released next year, if companies get the chance to utilize AMD’s next handheld processor. Although it might not be an immediate implementation, at least AMD has confirmed to Digital Trends that the Z2 Extreme is targeting an early 2025 release as the successor of the popular first-gen handheld processor, featured in the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.
This news comes from a joint Q&A session between AMD and Microsoft at the IFA 2024 tech show, a big piece of news alongside the new handheld that was announced the Acer Nitro Blaze 7. That one itself doesn’t use the Z1 but rather a mobile AMD CPU. However, the release next year does open up another refresh potential for both ASUS and Lenovo, even if the Ally X release wasn’t too long ago.
What the Z2 extreme could offer
As the Z1 is based on Phoenix silicon, AMD will most likely move onto something newer and more recent. That could be the Strix Point mobile processors, the Ryzen AI 300 NPUs offering an upgrade to processing power and hopefully improved efficiency. Something even more important for handheld gaming, as you want to get even more hours of gaming from that one charge.
If they are based on the new NPUs, it could give us a look at what the core makeup may be for the top-spec Z2 Extreme (if they follow the same structure as before). The AMD HX 370 currently has up to 8 Zen5 cores with up to 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units for graphics processing. In comparison the Z1 Extreme has 8 Zen4 and 12 RDNA 3 compute units.
In that case, we would see a Ryzen 9000 Zen 5 architecture in there that opts for an improved efficiency key for mobile gaming. It also slightly improves the onboard graphics found, although with RDNA 4 expected early next year as well, that might find its way into the Z2 as well. So we’ll have to see if we get an Ally 2 or Legion Go 2 next year to bring this NPU out or even a new handheld altogether will adopt the AMD processor.
