Given they now have populated boards, it looks like this thing might actually ship.

AMD also mentioned them in their Ryzen V1000 press release a day back:

https://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-launches-epyc-embedded-2018feb21.aspx

N-Gage was a phone that had to build its own ecosystem.

This is just a PC running Windows, or Linux, that happens to be in a handheld form factor.

In that context, I don't see the similarity.

Yeah, the name is terrible.

It was origianally supposed to be a Steam OS device, so I imagine it went something like this: Steam machine --> Smach

No idea where the Z came from.

In what sense?

If you're talking about the device not making it to market, that's always a possibility.

No doubt, it's a niche product and will likely have limited availability. I can't see them selling very many, especially if it ends up being priced too high. Of course, it simply utilizes the PC ecosystem and is only limited by the hardware. That's the beauty of these types of products, they don't need to be successful to be useful. It could even be a one-off, and still, it would be able to play thousands of PC games.

Specifications for the Smach Z, a handheld gaming PC, have now been finalized.

It will be using AMD's Ryzen V1605B:

Here are two pre-set configurations (although it can be equipped with up to 16 GB of RAM and up to 256 GB of storage):

Fernandez tells me the system will have a 46 Whr battery that can provide up to 5 hours of battery life while gaming and that the fan noise “will be very similar to the Nintendo Switch, 31dB.”

Credit Brad Linder (Liliputing)

Source: Liliputing

(https://liliputing.com/2018/02/smach-z-handheld-gaming-pc-specs-finalized-ryzen-v1605b-8gb-ram.html)

UPDATE - Pricing announced at Embedded World 2018:

Current pricing on their Indiegogo campaign is $490 USD for the entry model and $690 USD for the pro model. Their campaign closes on March 1st and estimated delivery is May 2018 (this seems a bit too ambitious, expect a further delay).

(https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/smach-z-the-handheld-gaming-pc-games#/)

That's a separate issue based on battery degradation.

Apple's most recent A11 throttles in all iPhone models due to severe thermal constraints.

You have it completely backwards.

When we’re looking at competitor devices we see only the the iPhone X able to compete with the last generation Snapdragon 835 devices – however with a catch. The A11 is severely thermally constrained and is only able to achieve these scores when the devices are cold. Indeed as seen from the smaller score of the iPhone 8, the SoC isn’t able to sustain maximum performance for even one benchmark run before having to throttle.

Credit Anandtech

Overall the Adreno 630 more than delivers as it’s able to double-down on the Adreno 540’s efficiency advantage. Qualcomm current generations of SoCs are simply unmatched and the gap is so wide that I do not expect upcoming rival solutions to be able to catch up this year.

Credit Anandtech

It's not meant to be a surprise. It's more of marking a milestone showing new hardware, at a ~4W TDP, outperforming old hardware that operates at over double the TDP.

Of course, and it throttles about the same as the iPhone X.

The A11 in the iPhone X can't sustain peak performance for more than one run without severe throttling, and in the case of the smaller iPhone 8, it can't even reach that peak due to thermal constraints.