Asus has introduced it’ll be delivery the ROG Ally Z1 version handheld PC ranging from October 3 for the painfully excessive worth of $599 (£599). This new machine will ship with primarily the identical base {hardware} because the top-spec ROG Ally, which sports activities the complete AMD Z1 Excessive APU, so in a manner you possibly can see why it is solely $100 cheaper.
In spite of everything, you are still getting the identical pretty 500cd/m2 120Hz 1080p show, the identical 512GB SSD, 16GB LPDDR5-6400, and a UHS-II microSD slot that will or could not soften the contents of which into a lot silicon slag.
The difficulty is that, whereas the AMD Z1 is a supremely attention-grabbing chip, it is very underpowered in gaming phrases in contrast with the Z1 Excessive as a result of it is utilizing the 740M iGPU versus the highly effective 780M possibility. The highest chip then has the complete complement of 12 compute items (CUs)—the identical because the Ryzen 7 7840U that is powering all the most effective handheld gaming PCs proper now—however the plain Z1 is rocking solely a 3rd of that.
With simply 4 CUs you are getting 256 shaders in contrast with the 768 of the complete Z1 Excessive chip. And that successfully places it at half the GPU silicon of the Aerith APU on the coronary heart of the Steam Deck. Yeah, a theoretical halving of the gaming efficiency of the Deck, however with a $599 price ticket. Ouch.
Contemplating Valve’s inaugural handheld gaming PC continues to be up on the market as a part of Steam’s twentieth Anniversary sale, I am struggling to see why anybody would both not save themselves a ton of money and go for the Steam Deck, or spend one other $100 and purchase the complete spec ROG Ally.
I’ll admit, I’ve not examined the Z1 version of the ROG Ally as but, so I can not say whether or not there is likely to be some particular sauce contained in the silicon that can provide it some edge, however wanting on the uncooked specs it would not appear possible. AMD has revealed some comparative graphs, which appear extra promising, nevertheless.
However it’s an attention-grabbing chip, nevertheless, given that it is the first of AMD’s efficient hybrid processors because it’s reportedly a Phoenix 2 APU, which suggests it sports activities each Zen 4 and Zen 4c cores at its coronary heart, and is not simply the rebadged Ryzen 5 7540U we thought it will be.
Nominally, the hybrid design brings to thoughts Intel’s Alder Lake and Raptor Lake chips, however quite than the identical type of Efficiency and Environment friendly cores, AMD’s Zen 4c cores are virtually an identical to the Zen 4 cores besides are supposed to have much less cache and run at a decrease clock velocity. They’re simply smaller so you possibly can squeeze extra of them right into a bundle if you’d like.
That is not what’s occurred right here particularly, the AMD Z1 is a six-core APU, with 12 threads of processing attainable, nevertheless it’s solely received two of the complete Zen 4 cores with 4 slower Zen 4c cores. However the photos within the leaked screenshots present an an identical cache construction for each the completely different cores, and that runs counter to what we would beforehand heard about AMD’s rearchitecting of the Zen 4c cores to accommodate half the L3 cache in an effort to slot in a smaller house.
Nonetheless, they do reportedly run slower, so whereas it would promote a lift clock of 4.9GHz (in opposition to the 5.1GHz of Z1 Excessive) that is prone to solely be for the large cores, with the Zen 4c cores in all probability operating a lot slower on the 3.5GHz mark.
Truthfully, none of that CPU aspect stuff could be a difficulty with the ROG Ally the place it not backing up a correspondingly weak built-in GPU. The precise octa-core APU, with a full 16 threads, is overkill for a handheld gaming PC, and a extra environment friendly APU however with compromised processor energy, would not be an issue in gaming phrases. However with a 3rd of the GPU silicon it’ll really feel actually underpowered.
Fortunately it’s going to nonetheless be bundled with three months of Xbox Recreation Move Final, so you’ll no less than be capable to stream some video games at an honest body charge, however native efficiency may very well be an actual concern. However we’ll have to attend to see the way it actually performs in the actual world as soon as we get remaining silicon in our labs.