The Ryzen 8000 series CPUs are about to redefine both handhelds and gaming laptops, with the latest rumors suggesting a mix of cores from both chiplets, full-fat Zen 5, and Zen 5c. And then there's the massive integrated graphics core, which is expected to be the gaming laptop chip we've all been waiting for.

But just as the Steam Deck has been hailed as the device that made the handheld gaming PC a real "thing," AMD's ongoing APU passion project is driving its evolution. the ROG Ally would not have been possible without AMD's Z1 Extreme APU. It wouldn't have been possible, and the many Ryzen 7 7840U-based handheld PCs that followed would have struggled without the outstanding Red Team silicon.

And this silicon lineage would continue. The AMD Strix Point chip, which was likely manufactured with the handheld market in mind, is rumored to feature four full Zen 5 processor cores, but the Zen 5c core is also alive and well. In other words, a 12-core, 24-thread APU will be at the heart of the next generation of handhelds that will appear in 2024-25.

And if you are concerned that the Zen 5c silicon is a lowly, slightly second-rate core design similar to Intel's Efficient core, the AMD version of the Efficient core is an entirely different beast. less, but it has all the good parts and a much smaller footprint than the non-efficient core.

It is designed to be installed in a power-limited chassis, so it only runs at a relatively low clock speed, but it works fine in such an environment.

We will first see this core as the Zen 4c core in the upcoming Phoenix 2 chip, which at first glance looks like a test run of Strix Point. In essence, it is trying to achieve more multi-threaded performance than necessary in such a small, 28W-plus form factor.

However, Strix Halo is only a full fat core for a big APU, as it has a full multi-chiplet of 16 Zen 5 cores; 16 cores for an APU. That means a total of 32 threads of high-end computing power in a super-powerful mobile chip. But it is not these numbers that excite this PC geek. It is the 40 compute units of RDNA 3.5 GPU silicon that piques my interest so much.

This is the same number of CUs as the Radeon RX 6750 XT, meaning real gaming performance. Notably, it delivers real gaming performance without a discrete graphics card. This brings the potential to extract unprecedented performance from a thin and light laptop form factor, and with the proposed peak TDP of 120W, battery life for gaming could be no less.

The expectation is that the Strix Halo APUs will be primarily found in laptops. Here we are imagining next-generation Framework 13 mainboards with serious gaming performance, but also in serious small form factor, NUC-like machines. Perhaps Intel sees the writing on the wall, which is why it has pulled out of the NUC business in a hurry.

This is effectively the kind of APU that made the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X such powerful gaming machines. However, the Strix Halo chip, which is said to be coming late next year, will be such a processor.