Ayaneo's has announced its new AMD Strix Point portable PC, and you can bet that CES 2025 will be awash in new AMD and Intel options

This week was a strange one for gaming handhelds. The OneXFly F1 Pro with its Strixpoint CPU, and a price north of $1,000 finally went into preorder. Now, Ayaneo announced the Ayaneo 3, which will also be upgrading to AMD's Strix Point APUs.

Videocardz has spotted that the new handheld comes in two models. One is the AMD Ryzen AI HX 370, which is the same Ryzen 7/8840U found in the current Ayaneo Kun. The Radeon 780M integrated graphic with 12 compute units (CU) and RDNA 3 is found in the first model. The Radeon 890M has 16 RDNA 3.0 CUs.

As we noted in our tests earlier in the year, the 890M represents a significant improvement and outperforms the 780M by 20% to 40%.

It's worth noting that a large portion of the handheld gaming market is based on the same basic specifications. Take Acer's Nitro Blaze 7 for example. It was announced in September and is equipped with the Ryzen 8840HS, which is the laptop-version of the 8840U.

It hasn't launched yet and there is no price tag, but I was surprised by the lack of innovation and creativity in its specs. This is partly due to how stagnant the market has been with a few central chips.

However, there hasn't really been any innovation in handhelds. The improvements have mainly been in the areas of battery life and screens.

Strix Point's better performance will make it harder for this handheld to launch at a low price.

Ayaneo, OneXPlayer and other handhelds with older technology will be seen as inferior, unless they are priced at a very competitive price.

CES 2025 will be held at the beginning of January. This is the best place for a company to make a splash by releasing new hardware. Consumers can play and hold it in their hands immediately.

The OneXPlayer F1 Pro retails at $1,899; the Ayaneo is not yet priced. But that's a lot to spend on a device like this. Ayaneo hyped up the new device by saying "the future is here" just a few weeks ago. This may be a part of the reason for its price.

The marketing hype is a bit overblown, now that we know what we are working with. It's more of the same stuff we're used from handhelds, but with a Next-Gen slapped onto top.

Only time will tell whether it's worth it, but I'm expecting to see more of them in the new year. Also, Intel Lunar Lake powered handhelds are worth keeping an eye out for. We've seen the MSI Claw 8 so let's hope there's even more to come at CES 2025.