AMD follows up on its impressive Ryzen Z1 chip, which powered the original ASUS ROG Allywith the Ryzen Z2 at CES 2025. You can pretty much guess what it offers: more power and potentially more battery life, but if you plan to wait for Valve to release a Z2-powered Steam Deck, don’t get your hopes up. Following AMD’s announcement, a Valve employee said “there is not and there will be no Z2 Steam Deck.”
The Z2 Extreme leads the Ryzen Z2 family, with eight cores, a maximum clock speed of 5 GHz and 16 RDNA 3 graphics cores. The least powerful model is the Z2 Go with four CPU cores and 12 graphics cores. This could be a useful chip for cheaper handhelds, especially those that tout game streaming capabilities rather than local gaming.
AMD didn’t have any performance metrics to share, but it probably won’t be long before we see the Ryzen Z2 in action. It will arrive in Q1 2025 in revamped versions of the ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. Although Valve said it was try to avoid a frantic horse raceconstant leaks around a potential Steam Deck 2 indicates that some sort of upgrade is on the way soon.
Updated at 4:00 p.m. ET: Valve clarified that it does not work on a Z2-powered Steam Deck.
