AMD has confirmed that it is working on it Ryzen Z2 Extremethe chip that will replace the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. It’s a very important announcement because it will become an essential part of next-generation portable consoles from brands like ASUS, Lenovo and other companies that are betting on the current cult of Ryzen Z1 Extreme.

However, during the official announcement, AMD did not provide any technical details about the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme, only hinting that its launch will be produced in 2025. This launch date allows us to compile a list of possible technical specifications based on the characteristics of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and the architectures that AMD has launched or plans to launch in the coming months.

AMD has already launched the first CPUs based on Zen 5, and Zen 6 won’t arrive until 2026, so it’s clear that the first will be the architecture chosen for the Ryzen Z2 Extreme CPU design, but some important things are still up for grabs. air, like its design, its configurationits clock rates and the GPU that will accompany it.

AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme CPU, Design and Keys

We can be sure that it will use the Zen 5 architecture, and I am also confident that it will do it again monolithic core design which we saw in the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. This means that the CPU and GPU will be a shared silicon chip, which eliminates the latency issues of chiplet communication, but introduces a space issue at the silicon level, forcing a reduction in the available L3 cache.

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme will have a 8-core and 16-thread processor at a frequency between 3.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz, in normal and turbo mode, when operating at the maximum supported TDP value. Each core will have 1MB of L2 cache and will have a total of 16MB of L3 cache, which is half the amount that the Ryzen 7 9700X has.

The difference in the total amount of L3 cache will affect your game performancewhich should generally be slightly higher than the Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU. AMD may take the opportunity to introduce specific changes or optimizations, but we shouldn’t expect an increase in the total number of cores and threads, because it won’t be necessary.

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme will be a chip aimed at portable consoles, the type of device where power-to-watt ratio as well as space- and silicon-level efficiency matter. Games don’t need more than six cores and twelve threads to perform well, so going over 8 cores and 16 threads would be pointlessa real waste of resources.

Graphics core: architecture and possible specifications

The most important leap over the current generation will be in the Ryzen Z2 Extreme GPU. The most logical would be to use RDNA Architecture 4and that it comes with a shader configuration higher than what we’ve seen with the Radeon 890M, which is the most powerful integrated GPU AMD has in its general consumer catalog right now.

The information we have about the RDNA 4 architecture is very scarce, but we know that AMD is focusing on improving power per watt and ray tracing powerso the generational jump could be important, so much so that it may allow this new GPU to push games at 1080p at high or very high quality while maintaining 60 FPS with a very limited TDP.

There are no details on its possible specifications, but considering that the Radeon 890M has 1,024 shaders, it is very likely that the new Ryzen Z2 Extreme integrated GPU will have the configuration 1,280 shaders. It is also possible that it is configured with the same number of shaders, 1024, but these are based on RDNA 4.

He ideal scenario In terms of performance, this would be an increase in the number of shaders and operating frequencies accompanied by a jump to the RDNA 4 architecture, as it would allow AMD to position this integrated GPU as a very powerful and very competent solution, even if it has to maintain a maximum combined TDP (CPU and GPU) of only 30 watts.

Possible performance of Ryzen Z2 Extreme vs. Ryzen Z1 Extreme

At the CPU level, the improvement will be quite modest. I would bet on an increase in performance between 5% and 10% on average in games. We will see a much bigger jump in GPU performance, although as I said it will depend on the configuration the integrated GPU ends up having. There are two possible scenarios, so I’ll explain both.

The first scenario would be ideal, AMD will increase the number of shaders to 1280, increase the peak frequencies to 3 GHz and also introduce improvements with the RDNA 4 architecture. The peak performance in FP32 of this GPU would be 15.36 TFLOPs thanks to dual emission shaders. The Radeon 780M has a performance of 8.29 TFLOPs, so as I said the difference would be big.

In the second scenario, AMD would keep the number of shaders at 1024, increase the GPU speed to 3 GHz and also introduce improvements with the RDNA 4 architecture. In this case, the performance would be in FP32 12.28 TFLOPs, again thanks to dual emission shaders.

Even in the worst case, the performance difference between the Radeon 780M Ryzen Z1 Extreme and the new Ryzen Z2 Extreme GPU would be large, but it is very important to remind you that we are talking about TFLOPs, and that these they do not realistically represent GPU performance in games. The integrated GPU is designed to work at 1080p due to the limitations it has in terms of bandwidth, and that won’t change with this new GPU.

Seeing the improvement made between Radeon 780M and Radeon 890M, I’d venture to say that it’s likely we’ll see a jump between 20% and 30% for the new Ryzen Z2 Extreme GPU compared to the Radeon 890M. Compared to the Radeon 780M, the improvement will be greater and likely to reach up to 40%.

I don’t want to end without an important note about possible ray tracing performance. The latest rumors I’ve seen about this technology and the RDNA 4 architecture suggest that AMD could at least double the performance of this architecture by working with ray tracing. If confirmed, the Ryzen Z2 Extreme could be capable of this hold much better in games with ray tracing enabled.