New AMD Ryzen CPU Leak Suggests Power of Future Steam Deck 2 Rivals

A new leak about the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme suggests that the upcoming portable gaming chip will have eight cores, which would match the number of cores in the Z1 Extreme chip that powers several current gaming laptops. That would mean no additional cores in the new laptops, but it would still mean double the core count Steam deck.

The current AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme powers the likes of the Asus ROG Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go, earning them spots in our guide to the best portable gaming PCs thanks in part to the sheer power of the AMD chip. The Z2 Extreme is expected to power the next generation of those devices, so some users could expect an upgrade in the CPU core count.

However, a new leak suggests that the chip, which is rumored to be based on AMD’s upcoming powerful Strix Point gaming laptop architecture, will keep the CPU core count at eight cores. The leak comes from regular X-based tech leaker @Olrak29_, who cites the NBD shipping manifest website as the source of the shipping information below. In this screenshot, we can see mention of a “NOTEBOOK Z2X28W” device with a “MICROPROCESSOR (8 CORES).”

We don’t know for sure if this will be the highest-spec version of the Z2 chip, or if that information is even correct, but the “X” in the listing suggests it’s an Extreme version and not the expected lower-power version of the chip (following AMD’s Ryzen Z1, which is less powerful than the Extreme version).

While this may seem like disappointing news, there’s really no reason to worry that future portable gaming consoles won’t have more CPU power than the Z1 Extreme. It’s just that the number of CPU cores doesn’t limit gaming performance on these devices, instead it’s the GPU power that limits performance, and to a lesser extent the CPU clock speed.

We can see this in the capabilities of Steam Deck, despite its AMD chip only using a quad-core processor. Many games run at fairly low frame rates on the device, but in almost all cases it’s AMD’s RDNA 2 GPU with eight compute units that holds it back. For comparison, the Z1 Extreme already has an RDNA 3 GPU with 12 compute units, which is why devices like the ROG Ally can run at higher resolutions than Steam Deck while still maintaining decent performance.

We’re also hoping the Z2 Extreme will have an improved GPU. AMD’s recently announced Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point chips feature a Radeon 890M GPU with up to 16 compute units, and a portable chip with the same GPU power would be great.

To learn more about what else we know about AMD’s next-generation mobile gaming processors, check out our AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor review , which summarizes both the official and leaked details about the processor that have surfaced so far.