AMD wants to take advantage of the boom in millions of portable PC consoles

If the star conference of CES was that of Nvidia, one of the flagship products of this 2025 edition was the new category of these portable PC consoles. Between the 11-inch models as large as a real laptop, the announcement of the Steam OS port for Lenovo Legion models or even the announcement of three Z chips from AMD, this segment is experiencing great enthusiasm.

“Barely three years ago, the market was driven by small Chinese brands like GPD and only weighed a few thousand pieces.explains Frank Azor. After two decades between Alienware – which he founded – and Dell (which bought Alienware in 2009), the man has now been responsible for gaming solutions and marketing at AMD for almost six years.

“According to the IDC firm, the market now represents millions of machinessays the engineer who had access to a paid report. “I can’t share the exact figure with you, but it’s this order of magnitude.”

While AMD preferred to postpone the announcement of its graphics cards based on RDNA 4 – as much for reasons of conference time as not to be in the shadow of Nvidia's new RTX 5000 – the American group has reason to congratulate. Because the No. 1 chip in this segment, the one integrated into Valve's Steam Deck, is from AMD.

“The market is like that of the PC 25 years ago“

“I am very optimistic for this segment“, assures Frank Azor. “The market is booming and reminds me of the PC gaming market 25 years ago. As for that era, this segment of portable consoles (PC, editor’s note) needs innovations, there are still many things to invent, like OS, etc.“, rejoices the fifty-year-old.

Faced with Intel's rise to power in GPUs, man is responding. “I respect their efforts and they do a good job. But we have much more know-how not only in GPUs, but also in APUs (mobile chips while integrating GPU and CPU, editor’s note). We have a real architecture dedicated to gamers, x86 architecture unlike Nvidia and much more history in terms of drivers“, assures F. Azor.
“We are launching the Z2 chips at the start of the year, we are ahead (Intel, editor's note) and we will continue to develop more and more chips“.

Home consoles, AMD's lifeline

When we confront him with the fact that Nvidia still has the performance advantage in GPUs while AMD has been powering all home consoles for two generations, Frank Azor returns the question to us. “But actually, if we didn't have the PlayStation and the Xbox, would developers be as interested in us?“, questions F. Azor.

“The partnership with consoles makes us essential, and that's why we can continue to develop our GPUs. We have not yet succeeded in reversing the market share in (PC gaming) GPUs, that is a fact. But I am confident for the future“, he assures. Before adding that AMD's mission is very difficult. “We develop GPUs that the public can purchase. However, developing a GPU for example at 500 dollars is much more difficult than a GPU at 2000 dollars. You have to be very competitive, and make intelligent choices, because every single square millimeter of chip is precious“, explains the engineer.

The Nvidia threat

If AMD is dominant in APUs for portable console PCs, the name of Nvidia also looms large in the segment. Already equipping Nintendo's current Switches (classic, Lite and OLED), the American titan is expected to power the next iteration, currently called Switch 2 by rumors.

In the field of mobile APUs, Nvidia could also shake up AMD with its N1X processor. An APU that would be powered by a Blackwell GPU on one side, and by an ARM CPU on the other. A chip expected for powerful laptop PCs, but also portable consoles.

Faced with the power of its competitor, AMD does not intend to give up anything, not even on high performance. “At AMD, we are also very invested in high performance. Take our Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip (Strix Hallo, editor’s note) : it meets a need for power in the PC world. This APU integrates a GPU three times more powerful than the competition. And our architectures like RDNA 3.5 offer an excellent performance/watt ratio and are very scalable (capable of increasing or decreasing power, editor's note)“, assures Frank Azor.

A big name in the gaming industry that reminds us of “that all PC games run on x86 architecture. And we're the only ones with both long-term experience with GPUs and x86 chips. What gives us the advantage“, professes F. Azor. An assertion which will have to be confronted with the future architecture of Nvidia planned for the middle of the year.