ASUS ROG Ally Gaming Handheld Manifest Hints At Zen 4 And RDNA 3 Firepower
A new leak from a shipping manifest has confirmed the core specs and name of the mysterious Zen 4 SOC packed inside ASUS’ new ROG Ally handheld gaming console. The SoC is reportedly a custom variant of the Ryzen 7 7840U APU known as the Ryzen Z1, featuring a 3.3 GHz clock speed and Radeon RDNA3 780M graphics.
When the ROG Ally was announced, ASUS kept a tight lip over the Ally’s SoC specifications. The only detail ASUS allowed content creators to share was the fact the Ally would feature a Zen 4 RDNA3-based Ryzen SoC. This lead us to believe it could be some sort of successor to AMD’s Van Gough APU found in the Steam Deck.
But the new leak confirms the chip will be a tuned variant of one of AMD’s standard Ryzen mobile chips, the Ryzen 7 7840U. This is an upcoming Zen 4 mobile chip in AMD’s Phoenix class featuring 8 cores, 16 threads, and Radeon 780M graphics. Its Phoenix designation means it will include an XDNA AI engine and utilize TSMC’s 4nm node, which is the smallest node AMD currently uses on any of its Zen architectures. We’ve already seen this chip in the wild, and it performs very similarly to a desktop Ryzen 5 7600X or Ryzen 7 5800X according to leaked Cinebench R23 benchmarks.
Even though it's not a fully custom chip like the Steam Deck’s APU, this chip will still be incredibly fast for handheld gaming tasks based on what we have seen from the normal 7840U. The rumored CPU performance should be plenty powerful to drive external GPUs like the XG mobile RTX 4090 which the ROG Ally supports and offer plenty of CPU horsepower for CPU demanding games and emulators.
The RDNA3 chip should also be very impressive. Rumors are placing the Radeon 780M close to GTX 1650/Ti laptop GPU performance, which is incredible coming from an integrated graphics chip. This should be enough to drive normal games at medium to high settings at the console’s native 1080P resolution. The leaked SoC will make the ROG Ally a serious upgrade over the Steam Deck.
