Intel is making its own handheld gaming PC chips with Panther Lake, smashing last year’s iGPU claims by more than 70 per cent. Intel chief executive Lip Bu Tan said: “We’ve overdelivered” during the firm’s CES 2026 keynote, and the showpiece was less the core design and more the iGPU and “handheld ecosystem”.
Formerly the 12 Xe-core variant, Chipzilla’s Arc B390 iGPU is claimed to deliver up to 77 per cent faster gaming performance than Lunar Lake’s Arc 140V graphics.
Intel vice-president and general manager of PC products Dan Rogers detailed the Arc B390 gains and talked up a “whole ecosystem” of handhelds, with partnerships spanning MSI, Acer, Microsoft, CPD, Foxconn and Pegatron.
Chipzilla had pitched Panther Lake in October with gaming performance said to be 50 per cent better than Lunar Lake and 40 per cent better performance per watt than Arrow Lake, then cranked those numbers higher at CES.
At the show, Chipzilla claimed Arc B390 is up to 77 per cent better than Arc 140V and, on average, 73 per cent better than AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 RDNA 3.5 iGPU.
It claimed the iGPU is 10 per cent better than the RTX 4050 mobile, while noting the RTX 5050 mobile still has an edge, because marketing always leaves itself an escape hatch.
Chipzilla is leaning on XeSS 3, with 4x multi-frame generation, to sell the idea that iGPU gaming can muscle into territory once owned by budget desktops. Chipzilla is planning handheld-only CPU variants of the Panther Lake die currently branded as “Intel Core G3”.
Because Core Ultra 300 Panther Lake is built on Chipzilla’s 18A foundry node, it can be split into multiple dies, allowing Intel to bias the spec towards GPU grunt where handhelds need it.
That push is meant to turn the handheld segment into a proper battleground, after the first MSI Claw became a notorious flop and only later models like the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and MSI Claw 7 AI+ started to look less embarrassing.
The Tencent Sunday Dragon 3D One popped up, but never got a full worldwide production run, while the Abxylute 3D One version barely made a dent, thanks to poor reception.
AMD has been holding the handheld crown recently, with the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X taking back momentum using the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, but Intel is clearly trying to turn Core G3 into a counterpunch. With MSI and Acer building Intel handhelds around custom chips, AMD is being dragged into a fight it was probably enjoying from a distance.
Source: IGN
