AMD’s Z2 handheld gaming chips are official — and not coming to a Steam Deck near you

AMD has just officially announced its full lineup of Ryzen Z2 chips for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck, after a brief tease this fall — but as of today, it’s pretty muddy who they’re for or what they’re going to do for handheld PC gaming.

First off, although AMD told journalists in a pre-recorded briefing that Valve’s Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and Asus ROG Ally lineups would all feature the new chips, it’s not clear that’s actually true.

While we’re expecting Lenovo handhelds later this week that could come with Z2, Valve has categorically denied that a new Steam Deck will include one. “There is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck,” Valve designer Pierre-Loup Griffais posted on Bluesky today, correcting the record after VideoCardz leaked a portion of AMD’s briefing.

While that denial seems pretty clear, AMD strangely wouldn’t correct the record on Steam Deck (or ROG Ally) when we asked. The company would only say that its slide was “designed to highlight our current handheld design wins,” and that it’s not “preannouncing any partner handheld devices.” That’s not a denial. Asus won't announce a Z2 ROG Ally here at CES, rep Anthony Spence confirms to me, but couldn't comment on Asus' future plans.

It’s also not clear what the new Z2 chips can do. While AMD is promising “more performance and capabilities than prior generations” with “hours and hours of battery life,” the three chips are each built differently.

The Z2 Extreme is an intriguing mix of Zen 3 and Zen 5c CPU cores with RDNA 3.5 graphics, four more GPU cores than last-gen, and can boost 5 watts higher for a combined total of what should almost certainly be more performance than before — though AMD hasn’t provided any benches this time around.

But stepping away from the Extreme, the vanilla Z2 has the same number of cores as today’s existing Z1 Extreme with the same RDNA 3 and possibly the same CPU cores, and AMD hasn’t mentioned any improvements over that chip yet. The Z2 Go has fewer CPU cores than even a vanilla Z1, and is on older RDNA 2 like the Steam Deck’s chip — but it does have 12 graphics cores, triple that of the Z1 and four more GPU cores than the Deck.

And, each of these new chips has a higher minimum TDP than the previous generation (a quoted 15 watts, up from a quoted 9 watts), which could potentially mean less battery life when you crank down the CPU’s power mode for less intensive games. (Not everyone changes power modes, though, so the TDP manufacturers ship it at may matter more; the Z1 Extreme’s sweet spot was around 15-17W TDP, while the Steam Deck’s chip nominally runs at 15W but can dip as low as 4W.)

Anyhow: it’s weird! But maybe the AMD-Lenovo-Valve-Microsoft handheld gaming event tomorrow will make things clearer.