Following up on its impressive Ryzen Z1 chip that powered the original ASUS ROG Ally, AMD will announce the Ryzen Z2 at CES 2025. You can pretty much guess what that will offer: more power and potentially longer battery life, although Valve might release a Steam Deck with Z2 if you’re willing to wait. Don’t get your hopes up. In response to AMD’s announcement, a Valve employee said, “There is no Z2 Steam Deck, and there will never be one.”
Leading the Ryzen Z2 family is the Z2 Extreme with eight cores, a maximum clock speed of 5GHz, and 16 RDNA 3 graphics cores. The least powerful model is the Z2 Go with 4 CPU cores and 12 graphics cores. This could be a useful chip for inexpensive handheld devices, especially those that advertise game streaming capabilities over local play.
AMD
AMD didn’t have any performance metrics to share, but we suspect it won’t be long until we see Ryzen Z2 in action. Improved versions of ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go are expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2025. Valve has said it’s trying to avoid horsepower competition, but the constant leaks about a possible Steam Deck 2 suggest that some kind of upgrade is coming soon.
Updated at 4:00 PM ET: Valve has revealed that it won’t work with Steam Deck with Z2.
