While AMD has been having a hard half-decade in the GPU market, one area the company has knocked it out of the park is with mobile integrated GPUs. Now with the AMD RX 8060S, it seems we’ve turned a major corner with this mobile tech, and the implications are profound.

AMD’s RX 8060S iGPU Is a Game Changer

The AMD RX 8060S in the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is the latest in the AMD Strix Halo family that includes all those new “AI” chips from the company. The CPU part of this chip is plenty potent, but what’s really making waves is the GPU power of the 8060S. With 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, the performance is pegged somewhere between the laptop versions of the RTX 4060 and RTX 4070. This also means that this GPU should stand toe-to-toe with the desktop version of the RTX 4060, depending on how much power it has available.

So far, the 8060S has been available in only a few products, such as gaming tablets or small form-factor PCs, but it seems that AMD is in the right ballpark with its benchmarks. Trading blows with a mobile 4060, while consuming much, much less power.

For some perspective, that’s in line with current generation console performance, in devices that run off battery power and are slim enough to fit in the same space as a MacBook or big iPad.

Tablets and Ultrabooks Are Becoming Viable Gaming PCs

I currently use an M4 Pro MacBook Pro as my daily driver computer, and thanks to a much more powerful GPU than my old M1 MacBook Air, I find myself gaming a lot on this device, either playing native Mac titles, or using Whiskey as a compatibility layer.

It’s nowhere near the RTX 4060 in my big Windows workstation laptop, but it’s more than enough to handle 1200p gaming on a 14-inch screen. I greatly prefer playing games like Baldur’s Gate 3 on my M4 Mac because it’s quiet, portable, and has insane battery life compared to my RTX 4060 laptop.

The AMD RX 8060S promises to bring even better levels of gaming and general GPU performance than that, but without the added hassle of needing ARM ports of games, or compatibility layers. Which means that a current-gen console gaming experience on thin and light tablets and laptops is virtually here. No cloud streaming, just local gaming goodness.

The Future of Handheld PCs Looks Brighter (With More Battery Life)

AMD is essentially building on the work it’s done for the Steam Deck with its custom AMD chips and the Z1 Extreme, which you can find in devices like the ROG Ally and my own Lenovo Legion GO.

The biggest problem with current handheld PCs isn’t that they lack horsepower per se, but that the power costs for that horsepower is too high. If I give my Legion Go the power it needs to run its best, I’d be lucky to get 90 minutes of portable playtime. Presumably something like the 8060S or some cut-down version of it could provide the same performance, but double or triple the battery life. In fact, if my Legion Go had twice the frame rate and battery life, I’d probably never leave the house without it.

We’re in a pretty good place with video games right now, so the idea of squeezing current-gen console performance, or something close to it, into something the size of a tablet is exciting. I thought that my M2 iPad Pro running games like Death Stranding and Resident Evil 8 was impressive, but this is something else.

Now if Only This Would Trickle Up to AMD’s dGPUs

While Intel’s second-generation Arc Battlemage technology seems to be offering a great showing in handheld and ultrabook devices too, AMD still has this market segment sewn up, and the 8060S looks like a great harbinger of things to come.

Now, I just wish that some of that would roll uphill to their higher-end cards. At this point it looks like AMD has given up on competing at the high-end and would rather focus on competing in the mid-range. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, since that’s where most of us buy our GPU anyway, but with the upcoming RX 9070XT and RX 9070 I’d love to see a similar story of low-power and strong performance we’ve seen so far in the 8060S.