AMD Ryzen Z2 vs AMD Steam Deck OLED APU

AMD Ryzen Z2

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme is a powerful handheld processor (APU) of the Hawk Point family. It is based on the old Ryzen 7 7840U / 8840U but without the Ryzen AI engine. Its eight Zen 4 cores run at 3.3 GHz to 5.1 GHz and are SMT-enabled for a total of 16 processing threads. 

Architecture & Features

Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips are. That's not to say there is no difference between the three. With Hawk Point, AMD is betting big on generative AI; these chips are promised to deliver an up to 40% increase in generative AI performance over 7040 series APUs making apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Photoshop more powerful than ever before.

Unlike Zen 3, Zen 4 features AVX512 support and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers across the board, is slated to deliver a double-digit IPC improvement over the former.

Elsewhere, the 8840U has 16 MB of L3 cache and support for super-fast DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-7500 RAM. The chip is compatible with USB 4 and thus with Thunderbolt. It comes with 20 PCIe 4 lanes, giving fast NVMe SSD up to 7.8 GB/s of throughput.

Performance

Since the Z2 Extreme is a 8840U / 7840U in disguise, it's safe to expect it to be about as fast as the Core i7-12650H, as far as multi-thread performance is concerned. 

Graphics

The Radeon 780M has 12 CUs (768 shaders) at a currently not known clock frequency (most likely reduced compared to the Ryzen 7). 

Power consumption

This Ryzen 7 series chip has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 28 W (configurable from 15 - 30 Watt). 

The Z2 Extreme is built with TSMC's 4 nm process..

AMD Steam Deck OLED APU

The AMD Custom APU 0405 is a 6nm chip in the Steam Deck OLED gaming console. The CPU is called "6 nm AMD APU" by Valve and offers four Zen 2 cores which are clocked from 2.4 - 3.6 GHz. 

The CPU performance is similar to the older AMD Ryzen 3 4300U with also four Zen 2 cores (no SMT) but slightly higher clock rates (2.7 - 3.7 GHz) and usually better cooling. Compared to the LCD version, which is still manufactured in 7nm, the performance hardly changes.

The integrated GPU uses the modern RDNA 2 architecture with 8 CUs, which sits between a Radeon 660M and 680M, so to speak.

The chip is manufactured at TSMC in the N6 process (6nm) and is specified with a TDP of 15 watts. In software, the APU can also be reduced to up to 4 watts for significantly longer battery life.