AYA NEO AIR Plus: World's first AMD Mendocino machine announced with a quarter the graphics power of the Steam Deck

AYA NEO has announced the AIR Plus, the third entry in the AYA NEO AIR series. However, the AIR Plus is not a more advanced version of the basic AYA NEO AIR, which relies on the Ryzen 5 5560U, an AMD Barcelo APU with RX Vega graphics. In fact, it seems that the AIR Plus does not feature an OLED display, one of the AIR series' selling points.

Instead, AYA NEO equips the AIR Plus with a 6-inch IPS panel that outputs at 1080p. Additionally, the AIR Plus relies on AMD Mendocino APUs, unveiled last week at Computex 2022. To recap, AMD has based its Mendocino architecture on 6 nm TSMC nodes, along with four Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2-based GPUs. According to Angstronomics, Mendocino APUs have one RDNA 2 workgroup processor (WGP), equivalent to 2 Compute Units (CUs).

Hence, the AIR Plus will have a quarter of the CUs that the Steam Deck has. In other words, do not expect the AIR Plus to compete with the Steam Deck when it debuts later this year. AYA NEO hopes to begin offering the AIR Plus in Q4 2022 from US$199 for AYA NEO community members and US$289 generally. For reference, that pricing would undercut the Steam Deck by US$60. The AIR Plus will feature M.2 2280 storage and a microSD card reader; other specifications remain unknown at this stage.

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