Ayaneo's new handheld is set to pummel the Steam Deck, thanks to AMD Strix Halo

Ayaneo is on a roll lately with new handhelds, but it's just announced a brand new model with a powerhouse AMD chip that makes it a serious Steam Deck contender. The Ayaneo Next 2 will be the company's first gaming handheld running an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU that houses a gaming GPU more powerful than that of the PlayStation 5.

This isn't the first, second, or even third Ayaneo handheld that we've seen in recent months. Just a few months ago, our Ayaneo 3 review found that the company's most recent flagship device, powered by the less powerful but still very capable AMD Strix Point chip, offered seriously powerful gaming performance. With the Xbox Ally handheld on its way too soon, we'll be seeing the competition on our best handheld guide get even tougher to beat.

The company hasn't released all the details just yet, but it has shown off early renders of the device, along with some of its components, during a a lengthy video outlining the company's future strategy. The screen size is unclear, but given the proportions, it looks to be at least eight inches. Performance wise, we know that its AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU can have up to 16 Zen 5 cores, along with an integrated RNDA 3.5-based GPU with 40 compute units, which is more than double the GPU power of Strix Point.

We got a taste of the power of Strix Halo in our Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) review. That gaming tablet delivers incredible gaming performance for its size, even if a tablet form factor proved to be an odd choice for overall practicality.

Meanwhile, diving a little deeper into our PlayStation 5 comparison, its RDNA 2 GPU has only 36 compute units. Admittedly, handhelds like this one use shared memory and have much tighter power usage limits, but it shows how much better the new series of handhelds are becoming. A fairer comparison might be against the Steam Deck's Aerith APU, which uses an RDNA 2 GPU with only eight compute units, giving this newer Ayaneo handheld significantly more performance on paper.

Alongside the powerful AMD gaming CPU, the Ayaneo Next 2 will reportedly come with a "high-capacity battery," along with a control layout common to most handhelds like the Steam Deck, as well as a heatsink with two fans. It's unclear what operating system the handheld will run, although we'd expect it to run Windows 11, like the Ayaneo 3.

It also appears from the launch video that the Ayaneo Next 2's motherboard has four M.2 slots. However, there's no indication as to whether it will actually support that many SSDs, or whether it'll be possible to easily install your own.

This is the second handheld we've seen with this AMD Ryzen APU appear in just under a week. GPD teased the GPD Win 5 just last week, with that flagship also containing the powerful AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 365. Performance on that device looks to be extremely powerful at 1080p, delivering high frame rates in GPU-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077 without requiring frame gen and we'll be hoping to see similar performance on this Ayaneo handheld, too.

It's also not the first time we've heard the name Ayaneo Next 2, either. We first reported on early Ayaneo Next 2 details back in June 2022, with a suggestion at the time that Ayaneo was working on a device with a discrete GPU, an approach that's been abandoned here. The renders it has shown, however, look identical to images that were shown off at the time, so the end product might not be entirely dissimilar to the handheld the company envisioned back in 2022, just with a lot more firepower.

Ayaneo hasn't announced a release date, or a price, for the Ayaneo Next 2, but we hope to see it launch before the end of the year. Make sure to check out our AOKZOE A1X review to see why that competitor is the Windows handheld to beat right now with fantastic gaming performance.

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