Well, technically...

Both AOKZOE A1X and AYANEO 3 are using AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 - I'm not completely certain Z2 Extreme in XBOX ROG Ally X and HX370 are made of the same cloth, but it appears they are both using 890m for GPU, but with HX370 having 12 core CPU (vs 8 in Z2 Extreme), as well as HX370 having AI engine.

I can see this selling a couple million to enthusiasts, but given the entire handheld PC market only sold about 6 million systems in the last three years, this won't have much impact on the broader hardware market.

Cool for those who want it I suppose, but a niche product.

It's the first step - from my POV, MS is currently much more worried about SteamOS than anything happening in console market.

Depends on set TDP.

Testing Ryzen APU's, if you peg the CPU's hard, it will take TDP from the GPU and lower gaming performance in some instances, unless you manually park cores and hope the power gating is effective.

But if it's a CPU bound scenario, the HX 370 would win.

Z2 Extreme in the Rog Ally X Xbox has an NPU block for A.I... For what its worth. Only 50 TOPS though AFAIK.

Yeah, they already lost to Android and iOS in the mobile world, they don't want to repeat the same mistakes in PC gaming.

Yeah, that's why I said technically ;) But yeah, in CPU heavy games, HX370 most likely wins.

Oh, and I didn't know there are two versions of Z2 Extreme, AI and non AI, so my mistake on that one:

Anyway, exciting times - with Valve making SteamOS available to handheld manufacturers, they are really taking a shot at MS, especially when games run better on it than on standard Win11. So it will be interesting to see how this cleaned up version fairs against SteamOS.

So far, I'm really liking what I'm seeing.

Looks like a solid device.

Considering it.... Pairing it with an eGPU down the road... Could get me back into the pc space.

I would probably build a dedicated gaming Desktop (Or racing simulator?) depending on how "Gaming optimized" this new fork of Windows 11 is... I would need to keep my workstation  PC though, I need the cores/threads and RAM.  ...But cue more whinging about GPU prices. haha

From my understanding it basically "parks" all of Windows 11's services and non-gaming required features like the desktop until you call them up... And according to the reveal it actually saves several gigabytes of RAM. - Not that I care about saving Ram with 128GB of the stuff... But it's a nice bonus to get every single FPS you can get.

But it would be amazing just to boot up a PC just like an XBOX and jump straight into a game.

Right now I think the real wild card is if the NPU/A.I block can do hardware A.I FSR upscaling... It's what would really push these chips far above the Switch 2.

Yeah, I think in near future we'll start seeing reviews and benchmarks on "regular Win11" vs "gaming optimized Win11" vs SteamOS.

I doubt we'll ever get sales numbers on this as we don't even get Xbox console numbers any more, but I wouldn't be surprised if Switch 2 sells more in its first week than this will lifetime.

Not that this means it shouldn't exist, but I can see why they piggybacked on an existing PC handheld as its audience is quite narrow; those who want to play on the go, don't want a Switch 2, and prefer Xbox over Steam. Very specific and probably tiny audience.

This is really, really not about Switch and Nintendo, but about SteamOS.