Asus ROG Ally: Gaming handheld as an ultra-mobile editing system?

[11:44 Thu,27.April 2023 by Rudi Schmidts]

Asus has announced two new handheld PC gaming consoles under the brand name "ROG Ally". Apparently, they want to directly compete with the Steam Deck (and indirectly with the Nintendo Switch). However, the most exciting thing is that the ROG Ally hides a complete Windows 11 PC under the hood, whose components should provide enough performance even for video editing.

The ROG Ally is based on a new APU from AMD called Z1, which consists of Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 graphics chips. This has a shared memory (16GB LPDDR5 Dual Channel) with about 100 GB/s memory throughput. The top model (Z1 Extreme) comes with 8 CPU cores/16 threads as well as 12 RDNA cores with 8.6 TFlops of computing power.

AMD&s Z1 Extreme is supposed to be able to deliver up to 8.6 TFlops of GPU computing power.

For comparison, an Apple M1-Pro has "only" 4.6 TFlops and an RTX 2070 about 7.5 TFlops. However, these devices also have a faster memory connection. Nevertheless, the Asus ROG Ally packs a lot of power into its casing, which is said to weigh just under 600 grams including a 7-inch display with 1920 x 1080 pixels, 512GB NVMe M.2 SSD and battery.

It should even be possible to connect external graphics solutions via a proprietary interface that is based on PCIe 3.0 x8 and USB-C. An Asus ROG XG Mobile Station (eGPU) should even be able to integrate a GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU this way. But that is of course rather a drag for a mobile video editing system.

What is, however, quite conceivable: to use this "mobile gaming console" with Bluetooth mouse and keyboard as an ultra-mobile editing workstation. Real Windows 11 applications like DaVInci Resolve and Premiere Pro should run on it without any problems. And if needed, a portable, large display could be connected via HDMI.

More than passable cutting performance with 600g in a jacket pocket?

However, the most surprising thing is the price, because for the Extreme version described here (16GB, 512 GB SSD, 8.6 TFlops) whispers

one just whispers 699 dollars. That is already a small sensation for an ultra-mobile editing system, which can possibly even compete with the editing performance of a simple M2 Mac.

Asus wants to announce all details about the ROG Ally on May 11 at 4 pm. And we are extremely curious about the first application benchmarks under Windows 11.

more infos at bei www.theverge.com

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