Meteor Lake, Arc 5-powered handheld gaming PC showcased

[Daniel Sims]

Something to look forward to: The recent surge in handheld gaming PCs has been made possible in part due to AMD's mobile APUs, but Intel could disrupt things. A new entrant in the market might provide an early preview of the company's forthcoming Meteor Lake chips, which are expected to bring about a fundamental redesign of the company's architecture.

Chinese hardware company Emdoor recently introduced its entry into the emerging handheld gaming PC market. The device closely resembles recent products from Lenovo, Asus, GPD, and Valve, but under the hood, it runs on a processor from Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake series.

Named the EM-GP080MTL, this Windows 11 portable gaming system features a Meteor Lake-H CPU, integrated graphics based on Intel Arc 5, and an 8-inch 16:10 1,920 x 1,200 LCD screen – although the company didn't specify the refresh rate. It supports up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 2 TB of PCIe 4 NVMe storage.

It's unclear how this system compares to the numerous competitors utilizing variations of AMD's 7000U-based Z1 series, such as the GPD Win 4, Asus ROG Ally, Steam Deck, and Lenovo Legion Go. However, Emdoor demonstrated its product running God of War without obvious performance issues, and its menu screen suggests the ability to play titles like Elden Ring, indicating AAA gaming capabilities similar to the AMD-based handhelds.

One notable aspect of the EM-GP080MTL is its TDP, which ranges between 20 and 35 watts, while none of the 7000U products exceed 30 watts. This could give it an advantage over the competition, albeit at the cost of battery life (the Steam Deck, for instance, conserves energy by staying under 14W). However, it's still premature to make performance-per-watt comparisons between Meteor Lake and the AMD APUs.

Moreover, the Arc graphics chip supports Intel's XeSS upscaling technology, which could enhance image quality sufficiently for an 8-inch screen at resolutions well below the native 1200p in supported games, significantly improving performance. Impressions from earlier this year regarding this feature have been positive.

In terms of form factor, the handheld follows a typical design. It features a full set of gamepad inputs, along with two back paddles and two USB-C ports. Two additional buttons on the front of the device allow for OS-level menu access to control power profiles and other options. Emdoor didn't mention external GPU support, which some other portable PCs use for extra processing power when docked.

The company has not provided details on a release date or price yet, but the EM-GP080MTL could potentially launch in time for Meteor Lake's December 14 debut, making it one of the first products to showcase its capabilities. Intel's upcoming CPU lineup marks the most significant architectural change in years, featuring AI accelerators and a chiplet-based design. While the series primarily targets notebooks, it has the potential to be well-suited for handheld gaming.

Image credit: Notebook Italia

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/100558-meteor-lake-arc-5-powered-handheld-gaming-pc.html

 

[Dimitriid]

Even if you look at the latest revisits of Arc gpus, they will go something like 'Intel has really improved performance on most games! But there's still several notable exceptions where the drivers are so atrocious it performs 20 to 50% worst than other GPUs of the same price'

Sorry but you can't seriously consider a gaming product that's going to be forever tied to the abysmal intel video drivers. Now if you plan on doing other things with it for example, emulation, intel chips always win out with emulator performance and since they're community maintained they get patched optimizations and workaround so emulating on intel GPUs should be decent + stronger because of the stronger performance the CPUs get for emulators.

But that's quite specific and you might as well eat like a 10-15% performance loss on emulators by having a Ryzen chip that's likely going to be that same 10-15% better on most other games and way, way more on the games where intel drivers will be so unoptimized as to make those games unplayable and that's a matter of when, not if.

 

[dalpilot]

Even if you look at the latest revisits of Arc gpus, they will go something like 'Intel has really improved performance on most games! But there's still several notable exceptions where the drivers are so atrocious it performs 20 to 50% worst than other GPUs of the same price'

Sorry but you can't seriously consider a gaming product that's going to be forever tied to the abysmal intel video drivers. Now if you plan on doing other things with it for example, emulation, intel chips always win out with emulator performance and since they're community maintained they get patched optimizations and workaround so emulating on intel GPUs should be decent + stronger because of the stronger performance the CPUs get for emulators.

But that's quite specific and you might as well eat like a 10-15% performance loss on emulators by having a Ryzen chip that's likely going to be that same 10-15% better on most other games and way, way more on the games where intel drivers will be so unoptimized as to make those games unplayable and that's a matter of when, not if.

Intel has a long way to go to match the latest desktop and mobile APUs.

 

[Stingy McDuck]

Even if you look at the latest revisits of Arc gpus, they will go something like 'Intel has really improved performance on most games! But there's still several notable exceptions where the drivers are so atrocious it performs 20 to 50% worst than other GPUs of the same price'

Sorry but you can't seriously consider a gaming product that's going to be forever tied to the abysmal intel video drivers. Now if you plan on doing other things with it for example, emulation, intel chips always win out with emulator performance and since they're community maintained they get patched optimizations and workaround so emulating on intel GPUs should be decent + stronger because of the stronger performance the CPUs get for emulators.

But that's quite specific and you might as well eat like a 10-15% performance loss on emulators by having a Ryzen chip that's likely going to be that same 10-15% better on most other games and way, way more on the games where intel drivers will be so unoptimized as to make those games unplayable and that's a matter of when, not if.

That's just Intel Finewine at work.

 

[Jeff Schmidt]

Intel's 1st gen dedicated gpu's are actually decent. I think if the drivers were what they are at now when they launched they'd be in a better position. But still good to see some competition and still need to increase performance on older games. They just need to keep fixing the drivers and come out with there 2nd gen line up to see how it compares. The low end line up is pretty stacked with so many cards and used cards being cheaper than ever. So they kind of need to go mid to high end to make a dent at the $400-$600 price range but not sure if people are going to jump at them unless there $400 card competes with a 7800xt/4070.

 

[pcnthuziast]

The duopoly isn't going anywhere and intel, over time and in the grand scheme will only ever be a blip. A niche. Not what I want, but the most plausible scenario.

 

[Watzupken]

I believe the adoption rate will be very low. Intel Alchemist is not bad, but the performance varies too much between games. So much so that the higher end A770/750 struggles to keep up with lower end GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. Plus the base power of this Meteor Lake is too high for handheld @ 20W, as compared to 9 to 10W on the Z1 Extreme. So its not competitive.