While it was certainly looking like a scam at some point (accepting money, with no prototype at all, and uber-optimistic hardware delivery timelines), it looks like the Smach Z project is making some serious progress. They have announced the final specs, based on a AMD Ryzen Embedded V1605B chip (Ryzen/Vega). You get the following characteristics from that choice:

• 12W – 25W TDP (The Smach Z will have the TDP set at 15W by default)
• 4 CPU cores (8 threads)
• 2 GHz base CPU frequency
• 3.6 GHz boost CPU frequency
• 1.1 GHz AMD Radeon Vega 8 GPU
• 2MB L2 cache
• DDR4-2400 memory support

We also get some pictures from the current boards:

The first one is about the main board hosting the AMD chip, along with the RAM and the big fan to keep things cool.

The second board is to connect all the peripherals such as the Steam Controller-like pads, buttons, USB connectors, microphones and so on.

Other specs include:

• RAM from 4 to 8 GB (pro model)
• Storage: 64 GB SSD to 128 GB (pro model).
• Screen: 1o80p, 6 inches, with touchscreen capability
• Camera: only for the pro model
• Connectivity: Wifi + BT as usual
• OS: Linux or Windows 10. (arf)

Don’t expect any release date at this stage neither a unit price. There is still a long way to go, and many opportunities for the project to still fail later down the road. Hardware projects take time and require large investments especially when moving to actual production runs. We will keep following their updates.