As we all know, AYANEO has been quite busy over the past few weeks announcing multiple products based on AMD and Intel APUs with integrated graphics. The company’s CEO has just made a very exciting announcement regarding the successor to AYANEO NEXT, which had just launched earlier in February this year.
The console is going to be called the NEXT II. With this latest addition, the company is venturing on to an entirely different and new path with the addition of a discrete GPU. Following this, AYANEO has become the first handheld gaming console which comes with a non-integrated GPU.
The gaming console is going to be offered with two different configurations; you can either have it with Intel’s Alder Lake alongside the Arc GPU or with AMD’s Ryzen 6000 with Radeon 6000 graphics. However, the company is yet to disclose more information on which SKUs are going to be used by this system. This will not just be the first gaming console to feature integrated graphics but will also be the first of its kind to come with the Arc Alchemist GPU by Intel. From the looks of the form factor, we are quite sure that this might be an ACM-G11-based GPU, featuring up to 8 Xe-Cores.
There is a noticeable difference in the design of the AYANEO console which has changed from AYANEO 2 or AYANEO 2 Geek edition. The new console is quite visibly bigger and has almost reached the size of the Steam Deck. While we are at it, there is another similarity with the Steam Deck; the NEXT 2 is going to feature same trackpads on each of its sides. This hints towards the console being a good fit for most Deck certified games.
AYANEO’s entire product lineup for this year consists of seven new consoles. The company is also looking forward to start providing affordable consoles (sub-300 USD) too which will come with low-power AMD and Intel APUs. But for now, the AYANEO NEXT 2 is meant for the premium segment and though we have no official news about the availability or pricing, we are very sure that the console is going to be something shy of 1000 USD.
Via VideoCardz