At CES 2025, AMD has finally unveiled the chipset behind the next generation of handheld gaming PCs, the AMD Zen 2 Extreme.
The AMD Zen 2 Extreme, along with lower-specced cousins the Z2 and Z2 Go, are powered by Zen 5 CPU cores. While the Zen 2 Extreme is using a RDNA 3.5-based GPU, the Z2 and Z2 Go are still using RDNA 3 and RDNA 2, respectively. This creates an entire family of APUs (Advanced Processing Units) for handheld gaming PCs that should hopefully cause the price of handhelds to go down a bit.
With the Z2 Extreme, AMD is hoping to dramatically improve battery life, while also delivering console-like gaming performance to devices like the Lenovo Legion Go. By and large, the biggest limiting factor of these handhelds, especially at the high end, is how quickly their batteries drain when playing demanding games away from a wall outlet.
Graphics cores
16 RDNA 3.5
Mobile PC gaming is more than just handheld gaming PCs, and AMD has also launched its new lineup of Zen 5-based processors for gaming laptops, what it’s calling “Fire Range” HX3D. These processors, just like the chips just announced by Intel, will be powering the best gaming laptops of the next year or so. Unlike Intel, however, AMD is bringing the successful 3D V-cache design behind the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to gaming laptops.
This technology allows AMD to stack much more cache on its processor by printing it above the actual CPU cores. This both improves gaming performance and lowers temperatures, which boosts gaming performance even further. I’ll have to wait to get it into the lab to see exactly how these new processors perform, but if they’re anything like their desktop counterparts, it’ll be an exciting time for gaming laptops.
All of these mobile chipsets, from “Fire Range” HX3D to the AMD Z2 Extreme, will end up in gaming laptops and handhelds over the next few months.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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