AYN has shared new information with gamers about the current production of portable consoles and plans for the future.
Thor is currently in the process of shipping previous batches. AYN will soon open the next round of pre-orders — Thor (batch 6) and Odin 3 (batch 7).
Following the recent jump in RAM prices, developers have faced a difficult situation with UFS drives.
Due to supply shortages and significant cost increases, the use of UFS 4.0 is no longer sustainable. As a result, Thor and Odin 3 will switch to UFS 3.1 in the future.
AYN employees will make every effort to maintain current prices for the basic and Pro models of Thor, despite these difficulties. However, the cost of 1 TB UFS has increased significantly, so the price of Thor Max (16 GB + 1 TB) will rise to $549 (41,818 rubles). From the positive news: the team will introduce a new configuration with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of internal memory for $469 (35,725 rubles).
Prices for other versions of the Thor portable console currently look like this: Lite — $249 (18,967 rubles, SD865 / 8 GB / 128 GB), basic — $319 (24,299 rubles, 8 GB / 128 GB), Pro — $399 (30,392 rubles, 12 GB / 256 GB).
Thus, not only have prices for models with high characteristics increased, but there has also been a widespread deterioration in memory parameters. The scale of the problem becomes truly noticeable when comparing the speed and energy efficiency of UFS 3.1 and UFS 4.0. According to Blackview, here's what to expect:
- UFS 3.1. Sequential read speed — up to 2100 MB/s, sequential write speed — up to 1200 MB/s, energy efficiency — better than UFS 3.0, but still lower compared to UFS 4.0;
- UFS 4.0. Sequential read speed — up to 4200 MB/s, sequential write speed — up to 2800 MB/s, energy efficiency — up to 46% higher than UFS 3.1, which provides longer battery life.
This means a two-fold reduction in read speed and a more than two-fold reduction in write speed. For most retro games, users are unlikely to notice a significant difference. However, when emulating Switch, Xbox, PS3, and PC games, performance issues are likely to occur.
Thor console video from AYN's YouTube channel