Essentially, AMD has optimized its new Ryzen Z1 chips so much that, thanks to them, it is possible to make portable consoles of 9W. Last month AMD already officially presented these new low-power APUs, which include a standard and an “extreme” variant, both with architecture Zen 4 for the processor part and RDNA 3 for the GPU part.
AMD Ryzen Z1, designed for your next portable console
During its official presentation, AMD highlighted that there would be some additional optimizations and a specific power management system in these Ryzen Z1 chips compared to the previous Ryzen 7040U, and that is that both chips are essentially identical except for precisely how they manage power. power and consumption, making these Z1 slightly better and optimized for handheld consoles.
Many of you will wonder: what do these “small” changes consist of? Well, AMD has already answered this question: it seems that AMD engineers have gone all the way and have been testing completely new power ranges and voltage curves, specific to these Ryzen Z1. The biggest change of all is that AMD has completely disabled the engine XDNA “Ryzen AI” in these APUs, which means that although the block is inside the chip, it is disabled and cannot be used, saving a good part of the energy consumed.
It may seem that, in the age we live in where everything seems to be based on Artificial Intelligence, disabling this chip may be a strange decision. It is possible that AMD’s FSR 3 technology could use this engine, as RDNA 3 also has built-in AI accelerators, but none of this has been confirmed for sure for now. AMD has claimed that AI accelerators can be used for much more than just scaling technologies, like Intel or NVIDIA do.
Furthermore, AMD has also confirmed that the Ryzen Z1 APUs will have a TDP range of between 9 and 30 watts; the upper limit of 30W was already known, but the lower limit of 9W means that these chips can work much more efficiently in a portable console, where the battery autonomy is a very important point. If we compare it with the 15W minimum of the Ryzen 7040U chips, this represents a consumption reduction of 40% approximately.
Ryzen Z1 APUs are about to arrive
We must remember that we are not talking about something that will arrive “in the future”, but that they are practically already here: without going any further, the recently announced portable console ASUS ROG Ally It has one of these APUs equipped (by the way, you can see our particular analysis of this console at the time of its official launch).
Not surprisingly, with all the effort AMD has put into these new chips, hopefully the ROG Ally won’t be the only handheld console equipped with them, and we’ll most likely start to see many more contenders in this “console wars” equipped with them. with the same chip very soon.
