Dubbed the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, this chip is essentially the same silicon as the already announced Z2 Extreme—eight Zen 5 CPU cores (three fat, five compact) and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores—but with the AI-accelerating NPU now active.

The NPU (neural processing unit) might sound like a gamer’s gimmick. Still, it's more about letting handhelds wear the trendy ‘AI PC’ badge, especially as Microsoft pushes its Copilot+ features in Windows.

According to PC Gamer, it does not net you higher frame rates in Cyberpunk, but it will help with background AI tasks like image generation or voice commands without hammering battery life.

• All this will make life more confusing. AMD’s Z2 lineup is already a Frankenstein's lab of different chip architectures:
• Z2 Go: ancient Zen 3 + RDNA 2 (Rembrandt)
• Z2: Zen 4 + RDNA 3 (Hawk Point)
• Z2 Extreme: Zen 5 + RDNA 3.5 (Strix Point), now with or without NPU

To twist the silicon spaghetti further, the OneXPlayer OneXFly F1 Pro—one of the few handhelds with a Strix Point chip—already ships with the laptop version, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with an NPU.

The Z2 Extreme with NPU looks like a branding exercise more than a performance upgrade. But it ticks the right boxes for anyone who is hawking “AI-enhanced” handhelds at Computex.