Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen Z1 chips are APUs tuned specifically for handheld gaming PCs. (credit: AMD)

Nvidia GPUs power the vast majority of gaming PCs, but for more integrated game systems like consoles and handhelds, AMD's ability to offer tightly integrated Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs has earned it many customers ( and lots of revenue ). The most notable of these is Valve's Steam Deck, which combines a Zen 2-based CPU and RDNA 2-based GPU cores to provide passable performance for most games.

Though AMD designed the Steam Deck's chip exclusively for Valve, today, the company is announcing a pair of Ryzen chips aimed at the growing number of Steam Deck-esque handheld PCs from other companies. The Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme (respectively) combine 6 or 8 Zen 4-based CPU cores with 4 or 12 RDNA 3-based GPU cores, using AMD's latest architectures and a 4 nm manufacturing process to outrun the Steam Deck's APU.

The Z1 and Z1 Extreme are new APUs made specifically for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck. (credit: AMD)

AMD says ( via The Verge ) that the Ryzen Z1 can run games about 55 percent faster than the Steam Deck, reflecting the improved performance and efficiency of the newer architectures and manufacturing process. Interestingly, the Z1 Extreme's extra GPU cores (12, up from 4 in the Z1) improve gaming performance, but they don't come anywhere near tripling or even doubling it. The extra hardware helps, but we're still dealing with integrated GPUs here, attached to a relatively slow pool of DDR5 that they share with the rest of the system rather than dedicated GDDR6 or GDDR6X memory.

Enlarge / Intel's new flagship desktop CPU, the Core i9-13900K. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When AMD brought the first Ryzen processors to desktops in 2017, the chips' secret weapon was cores. AMD couldn’t match Intel’s number of instructions-per-clock or hit the same clock speeds, but what it could do was sell you six or eight reasonably performant processor cores at the same price Intel charged for four.

The 12-core and 16-core options came a couple years later, bringing high-end workstation performance to much less expensive PCs—and forcing Intel to follow suit. That brought down costs. In 2014, an 8-core CPU cost $999 on top of a pricey workstation motherboard; today, you can get 8-core chips for less than $300 and pop them into an $80 board if you want.

Five years after Ryzen debuted, the shoe is on the other foot. AMD now has the technological lead, in terms of instructions-per-clock, CPU manufacturing, and power efficiency. But by throwing more cores at the problem and pricing its chips aggressively, Intel has put together a desktop lineup that’s easier to recommend than AMD’s, even though AMD just fielded its fastest desktop processor lineup ever .

Enlarge / This "170W" number caused some confusion earlier this week because there are so many different numbers you need to know to understand CPU power consumption now. (credit: AMD)

AMD released some of the first details about its upcoming Ryzen 7000 processors , 600-series chipsets, and the new AM5 CPU socket earlier this week. We learned that Ryzen 7000 chips will perform at least 15 percent faster than comparable Ryzen 5000 CPUs and that they'll require DDR5 RAM. We learned that all Ryzen 7000 chips will come with integrated RDNA2-based GPUs, though AMD still plans to offer a separate line of APUs with more capable integrated graphics for people who want to play games. And we found out some details about how PCIe 5.0 support will work for SSDs and GPUs.

Another bit of information AMD gave was about the AM5 socket's power limits—the amount of power an AM5 socket will be able to provide to a processor. Power limits have become more important for PC builders and enthusiasts as core counts have increased and power consumption has gone up. Some of our recent Intel CPU reviews have explored how differently the same processor can perform with different power settings, though we've also discovered that boosting performance this way can have diminishing returns (that is to say, you can double your power use without doubling your performance).

AMD's processors can work similarly, though the terminology is different. Intel uses different power limits, with the PL1 value determining power usage under a sustained workload and the PL2 value determining how much power the CPU can use in short bursts (a third number, Tau, defines how long the CPU will run at that PL2 limit). AMD has a few acronyms for different power figures , but the most relevant is package power tracking (PPT). PPT is the maximum power that a CPU package can draw from the processor socket.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 7000 chips are due out in the next few months. (credit: AMD)

AMD first teased its upcoming Ryzen 7000-series CPUs and its new Zen 4 CPU architecture at CES back in January. The company said that the chips would use the new AM5 CPU socket, that they would be built on a 5 nm manufacturing process from TSMC, and that they would be available this fall.

None of those facts has changed, and AMD still hasn't announced pricing or more specific availability info for the new chips. But at its Computex keynote this week, AMD revealed a few additional details about the Ryzen 7000 processors and the motherboards and chipsets that will support them when they're all released to the public in the next few months.

Zen 4’s foundation: Socket AM5

If you build an AMD-based PC in the next few years, you'll probably be using socket AM5. (credit: AMD)

Before covering any specific features of Zen 4, Ryzen 7000, or AMD's 600-series chipsets, we should cover some basic facts about the upcoming AM5 CPU socket.