The Smach Z is a handheld gaming system built on the Steam Machine architecture that has been overhauled time and again since its first conception way back in August 2015. At one point it was using an AMD embedded G-Series processor, then an SOC with Jaguar CPU and several other hardware plans along the way. Now though, in 2018, it seems like the developers might have settled on one of AMD's new embedded Ryzen APUs, offering decent general computing abilities alongside some reasonable graphical power too.
The Kickstarter campaign for the handheld Steam machine has been updated once again, with the developers claiming that 2018 will be the year that they actually put out some hardware. What that hardware is exactly, remains to be seen, as there are a few different options they could go with.
The Ryzen embedded APUs come in a few different flavors. At the low end, the V1202B offers two cores, with four threads and a GPU with 3 processor cores. At the top end there are four core/eight thread CPUs with 11 GPU cores and a much faster CPU and GPU frequency profile.
Considering the top chips are a lot more power hungry than the lower-end ones, it seems unlikely that developers of a portable gaming console would want to sap that much juice while on the go, but it really depends on how capable they want this little gaming machine to be.
Liliputing suggests that it will be one of the 12-25w parts, which should be enough power to offer 1080P gaming at decent detail levels and frame rates for some AAA titles, which would be an impressive feat. If true, it could make the Smach Z quite a desirable little system. Whether it can compete with the likes of the Switch and standard gaming laptops and desktops though, remains to be seen.
