AMD's new Ryzen AI 300 APU looks super exciting for handheld gaming but what about the battery life?

Of the two big announcements AMD made today, it could be the new Ryzen AI 300 series APUs that's most exciting. Not only does it come with the same new Zen 5 CPU cores as the other major newness from AMD, the Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs. It's got a majorly upgraded integrated GPU that should boost performance substantially.

Some key questions immediately follow. Will Ryzen AI 300, formerly known as the Strix Point APU, appear in handhelds? And if it does will it get the top-spec chip and what are the implications for battery life?

The fastest of the new AMD Strix Point APUs at launch is the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. It ups the graphics compute unit or CU count from 12 in AMD's previous-gen APUs, such as the Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip found in the OneXPlayer OneXFly, to 16. The new GPU also gets a small clock speed bump from 2.7 GHz to 2.9 GHz.

Those two elements alone would imply a gaming performance bump of about 35%. However, Strix Point's new iGPU is also upgraded to RDNA 3.5 spec from plain old RDNA.

Despite AMD saying the first devices with Ryzen AI 300 will go on sale in July, very few details on RDNA 3.5 have been released. However, the rumours point to an architecture that's largely carried over from RDNA 3 save for one key detail. RDNA 3.5 supposedly gets a fairly major upgrade in ray-tracing performance. 

Arguably, ray tracing is RDNA 3's only obvious weakness in hardware terms, so an APU with an extra 4 CUs plus much-improved ray tracing is pretty appealing. The possible snag is battery life.

AMD didn't mention battery life at all in its release materials for the new APU. It also didn't talk about process nodes. Now that AMD has listed the chip on its website, we can see, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Strix Point is built on the TSMC N4 node, which is a refined version of TSMC N5.

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In other words, exactly the same silicon as the existing Phoenix and Hawk Point