Sapphire's new mini PCs lineup introduces AMD's recently launched Ryzen AI 300 APUs and is super-compact for better portability.
Sapphire's Edge AI Mini PCs Can be Carried in Your Hands While Offering Powerful Compute Performance, Thanks to Their Ultra-Small Footprint & AMD Ryzen AI 300 APUs
With AMD's Strix Point launch, many vendors took quite a bit of time to launch Strix Point-based machines such as mini PCs and handheld consoles. The premium price point of Strix Point APUs made them initially reluctant, but now as Team Red introduced its more affordable Zen 5-based mobile CPU lineup, vendors are rapidly bringing innovations into the market.
The latest is from Sapphire, a popular graphics card manufacturer, which makes AMD GPUs such as the latest Radeon RX 9070 series. The company has introduced its first mini PC series, called Edge AI Mini PC powered by the AMD Krackan Point APUs, aka Ryzen AI 300. These mini PCs offer an ultra-compact form factor for easy portability while offering great performance on a budget.
The machines are so small that they can be carried in your palms, thanks to their incredibly compact design with dimensions of just 117 x 111 x 30mm. Despite featuring such a small footprint, these offer powerful hardware at the core and modern connectivity on the outside, while exhibiting stylish and versatile design via the magnetic case-cover, which needs no tools for accessing the internal hardware.
The Edge AI Mini PC series offers either a Ryzen AI 7 350 or a Ryzen AI 5 340 processor, offering up to 8 cores and 16 threads for intensive operations and gaming. Both APUs also offer powerful RDNA 3.5-based iGPUs to play games or carry out mild to intermediate-intensive graphical workloads.
Users will get a regular M.2 2280 slot for SSD and another 2242 slot for adding up to two storage drives. As for the system RAM, a mini PC with Ryzen AI 7 350 will ship with 32 GB of RAM, while the Ryzen AI 5 340-based system will carry 16 GB of memory. In both systems, the RAM will be clocked at 5600 MT/s and share the SODIMM form factor, which is easy to upgrade.
On the outside, there are plenty of connectivity ports, including USB4.0 for faster USB devices and peripherals, regular USB-A ports, and HDMI and DP ports for display. There is a 2.5 GbE LAN for fast wired connectivity, but it does bring Wi-Fi for wireless internet connectivity and Bluetooth for wireless devices.
The prices are not disclosed yet, but we expect a sub-$1000 price tag for these mini PCs. As per the company, the Edge AI Mini PC series will launch in late April and may ship in bare-bones, allowing users to add SSD and memory as per their requirements.
News Source: Computer Base
