Aya, a startup behind the industry's first crowdfunded handheld Windows 10-based game console, has begun its Indiegogo campaign. The start of the campaign was postponed earlier due to components shortages, but now Aya thinks that the market situation is right to start the company's crowdfunding campaign. To be the first to get the Aya Neo, one must pay as much as $789 via the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform, reports Liliputing.
The Aya Neo uses the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U system-on-chip produced using TSMC's N7 fabrication process (7 nm-class). This APU has six cores running at 2.30 GHz/4.0 GHz along with with the Radeon Vega 6 graphics unit (384 SPs), 16GB of memory, and 1TB of PCIe/NVMe storage. The AMD system-on-chip is cooled down using a proprietary cooling system with two copper heat pipes and a fan.
The console has a 7-inch IPS LCD touch-enabled display along with analog sticks, a D-pad, and other game-specific buttons. The Aya Neo exceeds expectations with regard to connectivity, which includes Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5, stereo speakers, a 3.5-mm audio output, and three USB Type-C ports.
While a 7-inch x86 Windows-based PC seems impressive, the Aya Neo has its peculiarities. In particular, the console uses a six-year-old Polar/Vega GCN 1.4 graphics architecture that first came to life in the form of the Radeon RX 470 GPU in early 2016. AMD and game developers support this architecture for now, but only time will tell for how long this architecture will be supported given the fact that AMD is promoting its RDNA/RDNA2 GPUs and it is the RDNA2 architecture that powers both new generation game consoles, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox One X/S series.
In any case, without any doubts the Aya Neo is an interesting device from engineering and gaming performance standpoints.
