AYA NEO SLIDE: Manufacturer updates hardware with mystery AMD Ryzen 7000 APU after missing Q4 2022 release window
AYA NEO has updated its product stack, with the company altering specifications for the SLIDE as well as the Next II. For reference, AYA NEO initially revealed the SLIDE in May 2022 alongside the AYA NEO 2. The latter has since received over US$3 million in crowdfunding but the AYA NEO SLIDE missed its Q4 2022 release window.
In response, AYA NEO has announced that the SLIDE will ship with an AMD Ryzen 7000 series APU, not the Ryzen 7 6800U like the AYA NEO 2. The SLIDE may ship with the Ryzen 7 6800U by another name, though. While AYA NEO has not confirmed which APU it plans to use, Ryzen 7000 series replacements for the Ryzen 7 6800U would also rely on Zen 3+ CPU cores and the Radeon 680M iGPU. Currently, the Ryzen 7 7735U or Ryzen 7 7736U would be the equivalent Ryzen 7000 options to the Ryzen 7 6800U; AMD has not announced any 28 W APUs based on its Zen 4 architecture.
Elsewhere, the AYA NEO SLIDE will contain the same features that the company announced previously, including a 6-inch display that slides up to reveal a physical keyboard. Additionally, the device has keyboard and joystick backlighting, hall sensors and the usual assortment of gamepad buttons. AYA NEO has not outlined a new release date yet, nor whether it will seek crowdfunding support to bring the SLIDE to market.
