AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme shows up on Geekbench alongside new MSI Claw handheld

AMD was, and still is to this day, tight-lipped about the innards of its soon-to-be-revealed Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU for handheld gaming consoles. Previous rumours indicated it would be based on Team Red's newest Strix Point architecture. Now, a Geekbench listing confirms this speculation by highlighting two distinct CPU clusters: one with three (likely Zen 5) CPU cores and the other with five Zen 5c cores. It powers MSI's upcoming AMD-powered Claw 8, which was previously benchmarked using the same chip. 

It scores 2,748 and 12,182 points in Geekbench 6.4's single and multi-core tests. In contrast, the last-gen Ryzen Z1 Extreme scored 2,534 and 1,1358 points in the same benchmark. A cursory glance at its Geekbench listing reveals the Ryzen Z2 Extreme isn't running at its advertised boost clock of ~5.0 GHz, with this sample stalling at the 4.3 GHz mark. 

Geekbench also shows its 16 GB of memory to be running at 1,944 MT/s, which is very slow for DDR5. The Ryzen Z2 Extreme comes with AMD's RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 890M iGPU. It scores 45064 and 37970 points in Geekbench's Vulkan and OpenCL benchmarks, respectively, making it up to ~52% faster than the last-gen Radeon 780M. Overall, it is shaping up to be a pretty formidable chip, and it'll be interesting to see how well it fares at lower wattages.