AMD’s Ryzen Z2 Extreme SoC has landed in the handheld gaming scene with a serious splash.
Benchmarked inside MSI’s Claw A8, the new chip delivers performance numbers that are giving laptop CPUs and GPUs a real reason to sweat.
First announced in June 2025, the Ryzen Z2 Extreme is AMD’s most powerful handheld APU to date, built on the Zen 5 + Zen 5C hybrid architecture with 8 cores and 16 threads. It’s tuned for a 15-35W TDP and packs a punch with 3 high-performance Zen 5 cores (up to 5 GHz) and 5 efficient Zen 5C cores (up to 3.3 GHz), both running a 2 GHz base clock. It also includes 8MB L2 and 16MB L3 cache for rapid data access.
But what really sets the Z2 Extreme apart is its integrated Radeon 890M GPU-a full RDNA 3.5 setup with 16 compute units running at 2.9 GHz. This isn’t just a beefed-up mobile GPU-this is laptop-class gaming power in a handheld shell.
When tested on Geekbench 6 via the MSI Claw A8, the Ryzen Z2 Extreme showed impressive numbers: it beat all other Strix Point chips in single-threaded performance and matched the 10-core Ryzen AI 9 365 in multi-threaded tasks. Compared to the previous-gen Ryzen Z1 Extreme, it’s 26.5% faster in single-thread and 27% faster in multi-threaded performance. That’s a huge leap for a handheld device.
GPU performance is just as strong. In Vulkan benchmarks, the Radeon 890M in the Z2 Extreme scored 45,064 points-beating out the Ryzen AI 9 365’s Radeon 880M and even matching some full-size laptop-class setups. This translates to real-world gains for gamers aiming for smooth 1080p experiences on the go.
MSI’s Claw A8 is one of the first devices to ship with this APU and features 24GB LPDDR5X-8000 memory, making it a performance-first handheld aimed squarely at enthusiasts. And with other manufacturers like ASUS lining up with their own devices (hello, ROG Ally Z2 edition), this isn’t a one-off-it’s the start of a new AMD-powered handheld era.
So while Intel’s Lunar Lake might be peeking around the corner, its expensive on-package RAM and lack of competitive designs make AMD’s Z2 lineup the go-to choice for handheld OEMs right now. Unless you’re gaming with a cloud, AMD is now dominating your hands as much as it already does your desktops.