The big picture: Since the Steam Deck popularized handheld gaming PCs, AMD chips have nearly dominated the emerging sector. However, Intel doesn't plan to let Team Red have the market to itself. The company has been relatively slow to introduce processors for handheld gaming PCs, but its next product may have recently leaked.
Hardware leaker OneRaichu recently revealed basic specifications for the integrated graphics chips in Intel's upcoming Panther Lake mobile processors. One of these chips appears intended for future handheld gaming PCs, potentially to compete with AMD's Ryzen Z2 series.
The leaker describes an Arc B380 running at 2.3G Hz with 12 Xe3 cores. Another source subsequently claimed that the full chip will feature four performance cores, four efficiency cores, and four LPE cores – totaling 12 cores instead of the 16 used by high-end Panther Lake chips. This suggests that Intel may be tailoring the silicon for relatively affordable handhelds, similar to the low- and mid-range Ryzen Z2 APUs. Intel confirmed its continued commitment to the handheld gaming sector earlier this year.
AMD currently powers most handheld gaming PCs, including the Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, GPD Win, and Lenovo Legion Go. The only exceptions are certain MSI Claw models, which use Intel processors.
Although Intel chips do not match Ryzen APUs in raw performance, the MSI Claw supports Intel XeSS upscaling, which outperforms the FSR3 solution used by other handhelds. It remains the only handheld gaming PC with machine learning-based upscaling capabilities.
Intel's ongoing development of gaming APUs will likely complement its recently announced collaboration with Nvidia to design similar chips incorporating RTX graphics. This partnership would place Intel and Nvidia directly in a market that AMD has long dominated.
Other recently revealed Panther Lake iGPUs include the Arc B390, expected to feature the 16-core processors leaked last month for laptops, and the lower-end Arc B370 and B360, each with 10 Xe3 cores.
A presentation slide from last month suggests that Panther Lake chips are already in production, with devices incorporating them expected to launch in early 2026. While the lineup primarily targets laptops, a new handheld could potentially debut alongside them.