AMD announces Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme chips for handheld gaming PCs | Hacker News Reader

AMD announces Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme chips for handheld gaming PCs

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49 pointsthunderbong40 comments

Very exciting. I was already looking forward to the Phoenix APUs making it into handhelds, but these chips seem even more apt for that purpose.

There's some buzz about these being in the next Nintendo handheld[1].

AMD has the mobile and console markets cornered. I do wish it had more competition, though. NVIDIA is effectively dead in this segment. Apple has a great chipset, yet seems asleep at the wheel when it comes to gaming. Or at least not interested in being a real competitor outside of their walled garden.

[1]: https://teddit.net/comments/12yncdm

>Apple has a great chipset, yet seems asleep at the wheel when it comes to gaming.

These comments never fail to amuse me when Apple is one of the most successful gaming companies in the world by revenue. The walled garden pays well.

Revenue doesn't matter. It's not a real competitor to NVIDIA or AMD for consumers until it can run most non-casual / AAA titles _well_, and can dip into the huge PC back catalog. Gaming on macOS is still severely limited.

Apple definitely has the most successful gaming platform of all time. Hard to say they’re asleep at the wheel.

Not when compared against PlayStation and Nintendo offerings.

Apple earns more from gaming than Nintendo.

Numbers to share?

Microsoft Windows is a very successful gaming platform as the NT kernel has over 25 years of game sales.

Apple cares more about their stockholders than consumers.

When most people mention gaming on Apple, they're probably talking about full AAA games on their Macs, not candy crusher clone #9001 on their iPhone.

They are talking about Infinity Blade (still nothing comparable on the Web for a 2010 title), and plenty of others that came after it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/iosgaming/comments/t1iqlh/a_list_of...

Apple is more of a gambling company than a gaming company

In that sense android is the worlds biggest gaming platform. Mobile gaming isn't real gaming, sorry.

Who cares about a few thousand whales buying gems for awful games? They don't care about the gaming market that's actually interested in interesting and actually fun things. Perhaps they don't care because the whales give so much...

I'd be surprised if it was in the next switch. Presumably they'd want to retain backward compatibility with the older switch games on ARM? Unless the games' developers can just hit recompile somewhere and get an x86 ver, but how realistic is that really?

Also, on these low-power machines I expect the recent upscalers like FSR and DLSS, especially since it'd be easy for nintendo to encourage all developers to integrate them, to be very relevant when outputting to a TV, and at least as of right now nVidia's dlss sadly still seems to result in a noticable quality uplift over FSR.

There's already quite a lot of switch emulation on the Steamdeck.

On the topic of mobile graphics competition: If intel doesn't decide to completely kill their AXG division, the future of their integrated graphics chips looks pretty bright with the Adamantine Cache[0].

Of course, nothing specific is known yet, but there are hopes that the massively increased GPU cache could help them catch up to the RDNA3 unit in Phoenix APUs with Meteor Lake.

[0] https://hothardware.com/news/intel-patent-details-adamantine...

Are you saying NVIDIA does not have a successor to the chip they provided Nintendo? I thought the deal with Nintendo was a decade+ long deal?

NVIDIA hasn't had a competitive SoC in the mobile space since the Tegra X1. Looking at the Tegra timeline now, all subsequent SoCs have been part of their Jetson platform, or very limited 3rd party products.

So it could be a licensing issue, and they might have a successor specifically licensed to Nintendo. That would actually make sense, as Nintendo would likely want to stick to ARM, and use an exclusive chip not widely available. The discussion on Reddit is purely speculation at this point.

I do think NVIDIA hasn't been a player in this space for nearly a decade now. They were part of a great streak of devices in the early 2010s, but have effectively retired from the market for some reason. Thankfully, AMD has stepped in to fill the void.

Wow amazing chip. Running at 30W in turbo. It'll be fun & exciting to see portable units compete for increases cooling, pushing this higher and higher. Of course it'll need to also throttle down (and optionally shut off some extra cores) on battery, but I think people radically under-rate how incredibly effective that can be.

Also worth point out the upcoming Ryzen 8000 leaks, with Strix Point & Strix Halo APUs that look absolutely absurdly fast, with huge ram bandwidth, in 15-45W and 20W-120W (correspondingly) power points. I cannot wait to have small decks with these beasts. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Massive-AMD-Ryzen-8000-Zen-5-l...

Looks like very interesting Chips. Now let's hope AMD can manage to ship them in any significant amount.

So that's whats inside the ROG Ally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9a3oAiN2ik

edit after a little more reading, those chips would be nice in a small formfactor netbook style linux device.

> those chips would be nice in a small formfactor netbook style linux device.

The previously announced Dragon Range and Phoenix APUs would be a better fit there. Power requirement is still low (~50W), but since battery life isn't a concern, it can be much higher than what a handheld needs, and thus get much better performance.

> small formfactor netbook style linux device

something like the GPD win max 2?

PS5 is 10 TFLOPS, 8.6 TFLOPS in a handheld is just crazy

Honestly, I think the comment about LPDDR5 in the article is very telling...

Yes, TFLOPS are not truly indicative of real world performance, but considering a ~14% difference in power, why couldnt this thing EASILY run 1440p or 4k at 30 like the Series S or PS5? Series S has 4 TFLOPS and targets 1440p at 60 for most games...

i have to assume because the xbox and ps5 are plugged into an infinite source of energy with substantially better cooling systems on top

I think they mean a Switch like use case. Cooling implementation does still matter though.

Apple seem to use Quad-channel and more for the M1 Pro and Max in order to get the required memory bandwidth, maybe we can expect to see quad channel memory in more consumer CPUs in the upcoming generations if integrated GPUs start becoming more relevant.

Yeah, it's weird the 1080p numbers in the article seem so low. And there's no mention of 4k gaming, like with an external monitor or similar.

So, something doesn't seem to line up.

PS5 is 3-4 year old tech at this point.

Seems to be the same story as with Netbooks. The first Eee PC came with a custom Linux distro, but all devices after that just ran Windows.

Looks like this is repeating with the new handheld gaming PCs.

Handheld PC's have had both Windows and Linux support for a long time. Especially once you add in all the old UMPC's that ran XP/Vista.

Even if you just want to talk about modern handheld computers most of the GPD offerings have supported both. The vast majority of them before the steam deck all ran windows.

>all devices after that just ran Windows.

Yeah, funny how the eeepc was showcasing all sorts of things in both Linux and even in an Android system which all mysteriously disappeared once Microsoft got their vice chairman in a back room and laid out exactly what the penalties were for making Windows look bad. Even the extremely ancient and nerfed version of Xandros those netbooks came with was running circles around Windows Vista and then later Windows 7, that Microsoft actually brought Windows XP back out of retirement and extended its lifespan to have something that had anything close to performance. (Too bad even XP was horrible at font rendering and so many parts of the system were hardcoded to use nasty looking fonts with no scaling. Gnome 2.x was clearly superior to XP then.)

The original article has been carefully bitrotted so I had to go to the wayback machine to get it but here it is: https://archive.is/QZHWh

It's stuff like this that makes me laugh when people try to pretend that Microsoft "loves" Linux now. Yeah, Microsoft loves Linux the same way that a boa constrictor gives people "hugs" around the neck.

With Microsoft making more money in cloud both via and on Linux I have no doubt they really do love Linux to the tune of billions of dollars per year associated with it. Just don't mistake one love for Linux as having the same interests as another.

Steam Deck 2 lets go!!!

I wish someone could do a benchmark on it with max 5W TDP.

I know for sure it won’t be anywhere as good as Apple A16, but I still want to know the gap.

Not sure why the downvote though.

You know because you are invested?

I mean the GB6 score for Zen 4 and A16 isn’t a secret. I wonder if the downvote was for that. It would be quite funny.

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