The new top-end chip is the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, which is basically the existing Z2 Extreme with a neural processing unit glued on. It still has eight Zen 5 cores and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, so performance should sit somewhere around Radeon 890M territory. AMD didn't actually publish any performance numbers, probably because it was too busy saying “AI” in every other sentence.

With up to 50 AI TOPs on offer, it's the first Ryzen handheld chip to support AI workloads natively, for those dying to add machine learning to their portable Minecraft sessions.

For everyone not living on a Red Bull and GPU budget, AMD  rolled out the Ryzen Z2 A. It features a Zen 2 core config with just four cores and eight threads, paired with an RDNA 2 iGPU offering a modest eight GPU cores. It sounds suspiciously close to what powers the original Steam Deck, and is clearly built to hit battery life and budget targets rather than frame rates.

The Ryzen Z2 A is expected to sip power in the 6 to 20W TDP range, making it perfect for handhelds that want to survive more than half an hour unplugged.

Meanwhile, the fancier Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme will chug between 15 and 30W, but brings support for memory speeds up to 8000 MT/s. That’s 500 MHz more than the Z2 and a whopping 1600 MHz above the Z2 Go, the Lenovo-exclusive chip that now looks even more like an afterthought.

With this refreshed Z2 lineup now including Zen 2, Zen 4, Zen 5 and every GPU architecture AMD could scrape together, expect another round of handheld upgrades to flood the market, all promising better AI, better battery, and better marketing buzzwords.

AMD Ryzen "Z" Series Gaming Handheld APUs: