Everybody, it’s CES time. This year’s show kicked off with the release of new hardware – many of which you can’t afford, new gimmicks, flashy demos, and too many references to artificial intelligence. CES is also a time when new chips are released, and AMD brings new ones every year.
The chipmaker is pretty much the only player in the gaming handheld space right now, so there’s a lot of anticipation for the new Z2 processor and the upcoming devices. Unfortunately, despite AMD’s claims, it doesn’t actually include the new Steam Deck.
AMD has announced a new Ryzen Z2 series of APUs designed for low-power devices such as gaming palmtop computers. The Z1 and Z1 Extreme are already available in many first-generation PDAs, and several of the next generation are ready for upgrades.
As part of the CES conference call announcing the new series (via PC Gamer), AMD said the Z2-equipped handheld console “comes from multiple partners, Legion Go, ROG Ally, Valve Steam Deck.” This is obviously big news, but only because the last one was unexpected. Obviously, that’s not accurate either.
Valve engineer and Steam Deck developer Pierre-Loup Griffais was quick to clarify to Bluesky that “the Z2 Steam Deck is not and will not be.” He also added what most of us are probably thinking, namely that the slides may be intended to say “about such products, not to announce anything specific.”
Valve has long said it’s not interested in designing a new Steam Deck unless it can offer a more meaningful generational upgrade than the current model, but the company also said last year that we won’t see Steam Deck 2 until at least the end of 2025. So it’s possible – assuming the new model comes out later this year – that it will use the technology just announced, or perhaps an improved version of that technology. After all, manufacturing takes time.
Like its predecessor, the Z2 architecture contains both a CPU and a GPU on the same chip. There will be three models available: the Z2 Extreme, the standard Z2, and the Z2 Go. The two high-end options are almost identical, except that the Extreme’s GPU is more powerful because it has four additional GPU cores. The Extreme uses the RDNA 3.5 architecture, while all Z2s will not use the just-released RDNA 4.