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Anbernic is a Chinese company that produces handheld game consoles. Up until recently most have been Android or Linux-powered systems designed for retro gaming. But last year the company launched the Anbernic Win600, a relatively low-cost entry in the growing handheld gaming PC space.
Now the company is preparing to launch a new model called the Anbernic Win701. And while details are light at the moment, a series of recent leaks suggest that Anbernic’s second handheld gaming PC could be a lot more powerful than the first.
The Anbernic Win600 was designed to compete on price rather than performance. It comes with a choice of AMD Athlon 3020e or 3050e dual-core processors featuring 1 GHz Radeon Vega 3 integrated graphic and support for DDR4-2400 memory.
The Win701, meanwhile, is expected to feature an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor with 8 AMD Zen 4 CPU cores, 16 threads, and Radeon 780M integrated graphics with 12 RDNA 3 compute units and support for GPU speeds up to 2.7 GHz.
The Ryzen 7 7840U chip is substantially more powerful than anything available in the Win600, and is basically the same processor as the Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip featured in the Asus ROG Ally (the key differences are that the Z1 Extreme lacks a dedicated AI accelerator and features some custom tuning for use in handhelds).
Anbernic hasn’t officially introduced the Win701 yet, but we got our first look at the design earlier this year thanks to a patent application with some line drawings. Now YouTube channel NITTRX has posted a brief video showing a working prototype with some info about the processor and settings. (It’s likely that these images come from Chinese social media, but I haven’t uncovered the original source yet).
Among other things, we can see that there are LED lights below the joysticks, what appears to be a 7 inch display, a fan for active cooling, and a 5,000 mAh, 38 Wh battery.
There’s no word on the price, but it’s highly likely that the Win701 will cost at least twice as much as the Win600, which has a starting price of around $300 for models with Athlon 3020e chips or $350 for models with Athlon 3050e processors.
via @RetroHandhelds