Ayaneo's announced its new AMD Strix Point handheld PC and you can bet CES 2025 is going to be awash with new AMD and Intel options
This week has been a bit of a weird one for gaming handhelds. The OneXFly F1 Pro, complete with a Strixpoint CPU and a price tag north of $1,000, finally went into a preorder phase, and now, Ayaneo has announced the Ayaneo 3 machine, which is also making the leap to AMD's Strix Point APUs.
As spotted by Videocardz, the new handheld has two distinct models, one housing the Ryzen 7 8840U spotted in the current iteration of the Ayaneo Kun, and one with the AMD Ryzen AI HX 370. The former has the 12 compute unit (CU), RDNA 3-driven Radeon 780M integrated graphics and the latter has the Radeon 890M with 16 RDNA 3.5 CUs.
As pointed out in our tests earlier this year, the 890M is a definite improvement, and it outperforms its competition, with 20% to 40% better performance than the 780M.
It's also worth pointing out that much of the mainstream gaming handheld market relies on a lot of the same basic specs. Take Acer's Nitro Blaze 7 as an example. Announced in september, it is kitted with the Ryzen 7 8840HS chip, which is the laptop version of the 8840U above.
It has not yet launched and doesn't have a price tag but I was surprised to see the lack of innovation in its specs and this is partially because of how stagnated the market has been around a handful of central chips.
There hasn't been zero innovation in handhelds, however. The main improvements seem to have revolved around screens, battery life, and so on.
This handheld will find it even harder to launch if it doesn't have a great price point, as many other premium devices will swap over to Strix Point, thanks to its better performance.
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For fear of missing out on what's popular, it seems unlikely that Ayaneo and OneXPlayer are the only machines coming to market with these new chips, as many handhelds launching with older tech will be seen as inferior unless they come in at super-competitive price points.
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