Ayaneo Reveals Next 2: AMD Strix Halo Gaming Handheld Slated for 2025 Launch

[Cpt.Jank]

Just a few days ago, we got our first taste of what's to come with AMD's Strix Halo Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU coming to the GPD Win 5, but now Ayaneo has confirmed on YouTube that it will be joining the Strix Halo-powered handheld battle, with the Ayaneo Next 2—only the second confirmed gaming handheld to feature the powerful AMD APU. The new Windows gaming handheld will be the company's next true flagship system, and is technically the successor to the Ayaneo Next, powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 5820U—although Ayaneo does have more powerful handhelds that feature the AMD Ryzen 7 8840U. No official launch date has been announced, but Ayaneo claims that the Next 2 will launch sometime in 2025. Unlike the aforementioned GPD Win 5, the Ayaneo Next 2 will have a built-in battery, which might be slightly more limiting than GPD's backpack design, and it will also feature a dual-fan cooling system—both of which make the prototype assembly shown off in the stream look exceptionally chunky.

The specs for the Ayaneo Next 2 are few and far between, but what Ayaneo has shown off looks like at least an 8-inch display, a "high-capacity battery," and back-mounted paddles similar to those found on the Steam Deck and the Lenovo Legion Go. It's unclear just what the Ayaneo Next 2 will look like, since most of the images shared by the company are labelled as renders of an early design, but the likelihood is strong that it will need a sizeable battery pack for the 16-core APU and Radoen 8060S iGPU. There's also no word on whether there will be a version of the Next 2 with the Ryzen AI Max 385. Ayaneo also teased the potential for a mini PC based on the same motherboard as the upcoming Next 2, which would compete with the likes of Aoostar and the recently announced Mini-ITX motherboards that we covered.


Watch the full announcement video on YouTube. The Ayaneo 2 reveal starts around 51 minutes.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Apocalypsee]

Performance might be good and all, but I afraid as devices got more powerful it will become heavy because of cooling, plus battery size and capacity and can no longer be called 'handheld'

 

[dgianstefani]

30 minutes of battery under load?

 

[Aoyagi]

I remember someone saying that there are only two Strix Halo laptops because AMD is unable to maintain supply of the chips for more. And then all these mini PCs and handhelds started coming out from obscure brands - at significantly lower costs as well.

Such a shame for us jack-of-all-trades laptop enthusiasts.

 

[dgianstefani]

I remember someone saying that there are only two Strix Halo laptops because AMD is unable to maintain supply of the chips for more. And then all these mini PCs and handhelds started coming out from obscure brands - at significantly lower costs as well.

Such a shame for us jack-of-all-trades laptop enthusiasts.

It's a nice APU on paper, but the lack of FSR 4 support due to RDNA 3.5 architecture makes it objectively pointless for gaming vs a similarly priced CPU + dGPU RTX 5070/5070 Ti laptop IMO, and how much professional software support is there for Radeon? So it's a really powerful APU that isn't quite powerful enough to play high refresh rate native gaming with maxed out settings, can only use an upscaler that sucks, isn't really a smart buy for professional software that likes CUDA, but has pretty good battery life due to APU efficiency vs CPU + dGPU combo. Quite niche, and would have a place if the laptops weren't $2k+. Only compelling machines I've seen are the thin and lights that have more power and efficiency than they would do with separate chips.

The Medusa Halo looked very interesting to me since it would be based on an architecture new though to use FSR 4, but the recent rumours of that cancellation along with Intel's similar APU, due to the N1X APU being delayed, aren't promising.

Being forced to a significant upcharge to get the 64/128 GB shared memory models isn't fun, too, since 32 GB is arguably too small for RAM + VRAM on such a high end and expensive machine.

 

[rattlehead99]

Everyone is sleeping on the Ryzen MAX 385, it has 8 cores and 1 CCD instead of 16 cores and 2 CCDs, 32CUs instead of 40CUs, but the same cache and bandwidth spread across fewer cores and CUs and it costs a lot less and should be much more efficient, while giving you 95% the same gaming performance as the MAX 395 if not exactly the same, at lower power draw and Framework's own PCs are twice as cheap with the 385 compared to the 395.

 

[Aoyagi]

It's a nice APU on paper, but the lack of FSR 4 support due to RDNA 3.5 architecture makes it objectively pointless for gaming vs a similarly priced CPU + dGPU RTX 5070/5070 Ti laptop IMO, and how much professional software support is there for Radeon? So it's a really powerful APU that isn't quite powerful enough to play high refresh rate native gaming with maxed out settings, can only use an upscaler that sucks, isn't really a smart buy for professional software that likes CUDA, but has pretty good battery life due to APU efficiency vs CPU + dGPU combo. Quite niche, and would have a place if the laptops weren't $2k+. Only compelling machines I've seen are the thin and lights that have more power and efficiency than they would do with separate chips.

The Medusa Halo looked very interesting to me since it would be based on an architecture new though to use FSR 4, but the recent rumours of that cancellation along with Intel's similar APU, due to the N1X APU being delayed, aren't promising.

Being forced to a significant upcharge to get the 64/128 GB shared memory models isn't fun, too, since 32 GB is arguably too small for RAM + VRAM on such a high end and expensive machine.

What do you mean by "objectively pointless for gaming"? It plays recent games about as well as my older PC with a 6700 XT, or as well as a 5060, and apparently it doesn't get nearly loud as an equivalent dGPU laptop (at least in the Z13), whilst allowing smaller form factor as well. Any similarly priced RTX 5070/5070 Ti laptop with a non-U Ryzen is a lot larger and a lot louder (or is Chinese). Is there anything else besides the Zephyrus G14, which is even more expensive?

The Flow Z13 in especially seem like the ideal choice for people who do video/photo editing on the road, play a lot of games which are not necessarily the newest AAA drivel. It can almost replace my PC for gaming, I can easily move it over to my projector, and I'll appreciate the tablet features when I'm travelling for work.

I do agree that it really sucks that it has RDNA 3.5 though. Someone suggested that this is because APUs take much longer to develop or something.

As for Medusa Halo, last I heard it was going to use RDNA 3.5 as well. A bit ridiculous.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

Performance might be good and all, but I afraid as devices got more powerful it will become heavy because of cooling, plus battery size and capacity and can no longer be called 'handheld'

The Ryzen 9 395 can be set down to 7W, and at just 15W it already beats Strix Point.

It's a nice APU on paper, but the lack of FSR 4 support due to RDNA 3.5 architecture makes it objectively pointless for gaming vs a similarly priced CPU + dGPU RTX 5070/5070 Ti laptop IMO, and how much professional software support is there for Radeon?

People are running FSR4 on RDNA3 GPUs, so it's probably just a matter of time until official or unofficial FSR4 support is coming to Strix Halo.

https://www.reddit.com/r/radeon/comments/1lbbdaa/fsr4_on_rdna3_7900xtx_tests

 

[dgianstefani]

I do agree that it really sucks that it has RDNA 3.5 though. Someone suggested that this is because APUs take much longer to develop or something.
As for Medusa Halo, last I heard it was going to use RDNA 3.5 as well. A bit ridiculous.

If AMD releases yet another old gen architecture for handhelds/laptops, it will just go to show their contempt and complacency since they're currently "on top" for iGPU/APU. Literally the ideal scenario to show off their FSR 4 is with handhelds, underpowered devices with barely enough grunt to do native 30 FPS, or upscaled 60 FPS, consistently.
The Lunar Lake MSI Claw 8 is actually quite compelling, it's got similar perf to the 980m in the Z2 Extreme, and about 20% faster than the 780m in the Z1 extreme. What's notable though is that the LNL chip has access to AI-ML based XeSS upscaling, and not the compatibility kernel either, which is significantly better than FSR3.1, and very close to FSR4.

People are running FSR4 on RDNA3 GPUs, so it's probably just a matter of time until official or unofficial FSR4 support is coming to Strix Halo.

It's barely faster than native due to the shaders having to take up so much of the slack compared to RDNA 4's dedicated AI hardware. Still a good option to have, since "native" AA sucks, and slightly better perf in region of 5%, plus "fixed" AI ML AA effect makes the issues of the low res handheld screens less immersion breaking.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

It's barely faster than native due to the shaders having to take up so much of the slack compared to RDNA 4's dedicated AI hardware. Still a good option to have, since "native" AA sucks, and slightly better perf in region of 5%, plus "fixed" AI ML AA effect makes the issues of the low res handheld screens less immersion breaking.

The implementation isn't locked to RDNA4 because you can quickly switch to it on a RDNA3 GPU using Optiscaler. FSR4 seems to be using mostly FP8 for which RDNA3 doesn't have 4x throughput, only 2x after promoting each variable to FP16.
It's a matter of optimization at this moment (RDNA3 supports INT4 8x throughput, for example). This can either happen from AMD or from the community.