ASUS to announce ROG ALLY pricing on May 11th, confirms AMD
The cat is out of the bag, AMD came forward today to confirm the upcoming Ryzen Z1 APU series for the next-gen consoles.
ASUS ROG Ally will sport two types of Ryzen Z1 APUs, AMD’s first Zen4 series dedicated for handheld gaming consoles. The Ally will feature either the Ryzen Z1 Extreme with 8 cores or the Ryzen Z1 with 6 cores. There is also a significant difference between both chips in terms of graphics power, the Extreme chip will offer thrice as many GPU cores (12 RDNA3 CUs) as the non-Extreme variant (4 CUs).
The ROG Ally is thus far the only formally known product to feature this type of processor. AMD confirmed today that ASUS will announce pricing and availability for this product in two and half weeks from now, on May 11th to be exact:
AMD Ryzen Z1 processors will be available first in the Asus ROG Ally. More information about the Asus ROG Ally availability and pricing will be announced by Asus on May 11.
— AMD
As measured by AMD on a pre-release ROG Ally console, the device should offer up to 8.6 TFLOPs of FP32 compute performance (RDNA3 FP32 dual-issue architecture). That’s more than twice as fast as the Jaguar Polaris APU found in PlayStation 4 Pro. The console actually has more cores (18 Compute Units), but the clock speed for the GCN-based architecture was only up to 911 MHz. Compared to Ryzen Z1, that’s almost 3 times slower.
The Z1 non-Extreme will not be as powerful though, offering up to 2.8 TFLOPs it would still be faster than PlayStation 4 non-Pro (1.84 TFLOPs), but one should not forget that the console is now 10 years old.
AMD Ryzen Z1 APU series for ROG Ally, Source AMD
According to Don Waligroski (Senior Processor Technical Marketing Manager at AMD), the Z1 series is just a rebranding of Ryzen 7 7840U, although the specifications may be similar. The handheld version is expected to feature “customized power and voltage curves, among other differences”.
Expectations are high, but given the announcement from AMD, there is a hope that the company will dedicate more effort into designing even more powerful APUs for such products in the future. The handheld console market is about to explode this year with announcements from ASUS, AOKZOE, AYANEO and others.
| Handheld Gaming Consoles | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz | ASUS ROG Ally (Extreme) | ASUS ROG Ally | Steam Deck |
| Picture |  |  | |
| Architecture | AMD Zen4 & RDNA3 | AMD Zen2 & RDNA2 | |
| APU | AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme 8C/16T up to 5.1 GHz | AMD Ryzen Z1 6C/12T up to 5.0 GHz | AMD Van Gogh 4C/8T up to 3.5 GHz |
| SoC GPU | AMD RDNA3 12CU @ 2.8 GHz | AMD RDNA3 4CU @ 2.7 GHz | AMD RDNA2 8CU @ 1.6 GHz |
| External GPU | ROG XG Mobile (up to RTX 4090) | Not officially | |
| Memory | 16GB LPDDR5 | 16GB LPDDR5-5500 | |
| Storage | 512GB PCIe Gen4x4 | 64GB eMMC (PCIe Gen2x1) 256GB/512GB NVMe (PCIe Gen3x4) | |
| Display | 7″ 1920×1080, 120Hz (VRR), 500 nits, 7ms | 7″ 1280×800, 60Hz | |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.X | Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5 | |
| Battery | TBC | 40 Whr | |
| Weight | 608 g | 669 g | |
| Dimensions | 28.0 x 11.3 x 3.9 mm | 29.8 x 11.7 x 4.9 cm | |
| OS | Windows 11 | Steam OS/Win 11 | |
| Release Price | TBC | $399 (16G+64GB) $529 (16G+256GB) $649 (16G+512GB) | |
| Release Date | May 11th (Announcement) | February 2022 |