Cheaper ASUS ROG Ally Handheld To Feature AMD Ryzen Z1 “Phoenix” APU

The new gaming console from ASUS is going to have two different APUs, which is great news for gaming enthusiasts. We finally have confirmation that both APUs are based on AMD Phoenix with Zen4 and RDNA3 architectures, and they’re going to have similar configurations to the original Ryzen series. The Extreme version will have 8 cores and 16 threads, while there’s a new leak pointing towards a cheaper option with an AMD Ryzen Z1 chip featuring 6 cores and 12 threads.

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Geekbench recently leaked some information suggesting that there might be a slight difference in clock speeds between the variants. Apparently, the non-Extreme versions might be 100-200 MHz slower, starting at a base clock of 3.2 GHz and boosting up to 4.939 GHz. In contrast, the Extreme version can boost up to 5.1 GHz.

An essential piece of information from this leak concerns the RDNA3 GPU that’s built into the console. Since the console is primarily designed for gaming, having more GPU cores should lead to better performance. However, it seems that the Z1 non-Extreme chip might have even fewer cores than what was initially anticipated.

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The leak reveals that the built-in graphics for the console only has 2 Compute Units, which is significantly lower than the Ryzen Z1 Extreme’s 6 Compute Units (please note that Geekbench displays CU count divided by 2). It was initially expected that the 6-core Ryzen 7040U series would come with at least 3 Compute Units (6 CU RDNA3), resulting in 384 Stream Processors (786 FP32 cores) or 256 SP cores (512 FP32), which is in line with this leak. As for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, it’s been confirmed to feature 6 Compute Units (12 RDNA3 CU), giving it a total of 768 Stream Processors or 1536 FP32 cores.

Having only 2 Compute Units, the Ryzen Z1 would have significantly fewer GPU cores (3 times fewer) compared to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which could impact its overall performance. It’s worth noting that the listing could potentially be incorrect, although that seems unlikely.

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It is highly likely that the ASUS ROG Ally with Ryzen Z1 will be the console that was previously rumored to cost $650, with the Extreme variant being more expensive. However, it’s important to keep in mind that rumors about pricing are not always entirely accurate.

Via Geekbench