AMD's next-gen 'Gorgon Point' APU outted and seemingly sticks with RDNA 3.5 graphics which is disappointing for handheld gaming PCs if accurate

AMD's next-gen APU has apparently leaked. But don't get too excited because "Gorgon Point", as it's known, looks very much like a refresh of AMD's current Strix Point chip rather than a radical advance or really even a new chip at all.

AMD was reportedly making a presentation to its commercial partners, likely including laptop and handheld PC makers, when the slides in question were captured, only to be posted online by Korean X user harukaze5719.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the post in question how now been deleted, but equally unsurprisingly not before its contents were preserved for posterity. So, what do they show?

For the most part, a very, very similar chip to Strix Point, as seen in various laptops and latterly in a few handhelds including the OneXPlayer OneXFly F1 Pro. Gorgon Point has not only the same 12 Zen 5-spec CPU cores (likely in 4x Zen 5 and 8x Zen 5c arrangement) but also the same 16 CUs of RDNA 3.5 graphics.

It also has an XDNA 2-spec NPU and that's where the first clear upgrade comes in as in these slides, with the NPU rated at "55+ TOPS". Strix Point's APU is rated at 50 TOPS.

However, the slides also include some broader CPU performance uplifts, albeit slight. Gorgon Point is shown delivering a roughly three to five percent uplift in single and multithreading running Cinebench R23 across a range of power envelopes from 15 W up to 45 W.

That performance step likely comes from a small clock speed increase. The slides show the top Gorgon point APU hits a boost clock of 5.2 GHz, whereas the existing Ryzen AI HX 375 peaks at 5.1 GHz.

All told, then, this looks more like a minor stepping than a properly new chip. The slides do not reveal what process node Gorgon Point is built on, but based on all the carry-over specs and marginal performance uplift it's almost certainly the same TSMC N4 node as Strix Point.

Probably the most disappointing element is the RDNA 3.5 graphics, especially now that AMD has released its first RDNA 4 desktop GPUs to broad acclaim. Gorgon Point is listed on the slides as a 2026 product and RDNA 4 is a little behind Nvidia when it comes to features, so the idea that AMD will be rolling out new laptop APUs with significantly outdated graphics hardware in 2026 isn't hugely appealing.

Of course, an upgrade to RDNA 4 would require a major redesign. And the carried-over RDNA 3.5 graphics tally with AMD's reticence earlier this year to confirm that RDNA 4 would be available in mobile format.

With Gorgon Point seemingly sticking with RDNA 3.5 graphics next year, it's looking increasingly likely that AMD's next major graphics update for laptop and handheld APUs could be the UDNA architecture that unifies AMD's RDNA gaming graphics line with its CDNA compute technology.

For laptops, that's not the end of the world. If you want proper gaming performance in a laptop, Nvidia will do you a great GPU albeit at a painful price. Instead, the problem is that Gorgon Point looks like it won't bring much of a boost for handheld gaming PCs, which is a bit of a pity. Therefore, perhaps pencil in 2027 at the earliest for the next really significant handheld gaming boost from AMD.

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