Ryzen 4000-powered Aya Neo Founder Edition handheld up for pre-order

[midian182]

What just happened? While Nintendo’s baby is by far the most popular, there are more handheld game consoles out there than the Switch. Over in China, one particularly interesting example that’s just gone up for pre-order is the Aya Neo Founder Edition—a portable gaming machine powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U APU (Renoir).

Aya was originally set to start shipping its handheld in October but was delayed by a month. It does bear a resemblance to the Nintendo Switch, though the body is transparent, and it includes the kind of RGB lighting found in many PCs.

It’s the inside where the Aya Neo Founder Edition differentiates itself from competitors. The Zen 2-based, 7nm Ryzen 5 4500U features six cores/six threads and boosts up to 4.0 GHz. Being an APU, it’s also equipped with six Vega Compute Units running up to 1,500 MHz for up to 1.1 TFLOPs of performance. There’s an impressive 16GB of LPDDR4X-4266 memory and the option of a 512GB or 1TB SSD (probably a Western Digital SN550 M.2 2280 SSD).

Elsewhere, the Windows 10-based Neo has a 7-inch 1280 x 800 (215 PPI) IPS touch display, which is a tiny bit larger than the Switch’s 6.2-inch 1280 x 720 LCD (240 PPI). There are also three USB-C ports, a 47 Whr battery, a gyroscope, a gravity sensor, stereo speakers, and Bluetooth 5.0/Wi-Fi 6 connectivity inside the 255 x 106 x 20mm case, all while keeping the weight at 650g. You can even connect a wireless keyboard or mouse.

YouTube channel The Phawx in August showed Horizon Zero Dawn running at around 32 fps at 1280 x 800 on a pre-production unit, a figure would likely be higher now following optimizations and new drivers.

Currently, the Aya Neo Founder Edition is only available to pre-order in China for CNY 3,999 (~$603) or CNY 4,599 (~$694) for the 1 TB version. Aya is considering launching an Indiegogo campaign so the rest of the world can get hold of one.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/87535-ryzen-4000-powered-aya-neo-founder-handheld-up.html

 

[SirDigby]

If this is a decent handheld PC masquerading as a console, that can play PC games as well as a switch that'd be pretty decent. Just needs decent controller support, and a way to use the keyboard/ mouse properly - if you've gotta use a keyboard and mouse with the tiny screen I don't think anyone will bother, if you are hooking it up to a telly or monitor, maaaaybe good for a portable gaming PC while awaybut why not just have a laptop? Not much sense to play at home if you can have a proper PC.

 

[Puiu]

If it's running windows then maybe someone can tweak the power draw of the APU to be lower while being at the same performance level. A bit of undervolting does wonders sometimes.

 

[Squid Surprise]

Oh, I was looking for something that wasn’t quite as good as a Switch, with no developer support and costs more than twice as much... yippee!