Even though the Z1 comes with 3x fewer RDNA3 CUs compared to the Z1 Extreme, it offers superb efficiency at 15W.
After months of waiting, benchmarks of AMD's vanilla Ryzen Z1 chip have finally surfaced, giving us some insight into the chip's performance before we see it appear in handhelds later this year like the ROG Ally. We first heard about the APU back in May, alongside the Z1 Extreme, as gaming-optimized mobile APUs designed for handheld gaming PCs, but only the Z1 Extreme was in reviewed systems.
Now, in a review published by David Huang on Zhulanlan using an unnamed gaming handheld, we've learned that that the Z1 excels specifically at low-TDP gaming featuring power ratings around 15W. At 15W, the chip is extremely efficient, featuring vastly superior performance per watt compared to the Ryzen 7 7840U at 25W.
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The Z1 is even more impressive when its power envelope is cut in half to just 15W. At this power rating, the chip only loses 15-18% of its performance while cutting its power consumption in half. Even at 15W, the chip offered mostly playable performance, outputting 31 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 720 p/low, and anywhere between 36 to 60 fps in Genshin Impact, Star Rail Central Starskiff Haven, and Forza Horizon at 720p as well. The only game the Z1 had trouble with was Metro Exodus at 720p normal settings, with a frame rate just below 30FPS. But this problem can easily be remedied by dropping some settings or dropping the base resolution with upscaling.