Overview

• At a 17-watt power envelope, the Ryzen Z2 Extreme delivered roughly 8.5% higher average frame rates and superior 1% lows compared with Intel’s Core Ultra 7 258V in MSI Claw handheld tests.
• When tested at a 30-watt cap, AMD’s lead narrowed to about 6%, reflecting diminishing scaling benefits beyond the lower power threshold.
• Both the MSI Claw A8 and Claw 8 AI+ models carry a similar premium price tag of approximately $900 to $1,000, positioning them evenly in the handheld gaming market.
• The Ryzen Z2 Extreme features an 8-core/16-thread design with up to a 5.0 GHz boost and a 16-CU RDNA 3.5 GPU, while Intel’s 258V APU combines eight hybrid cores and eight Xe2 graphics cores on TSMC’s N3B node.
• Discrepancies in whether onboard memory power draw was included uniformly between AMD’s external memory setup and Intel’s integrated memory raise questions about the fairness of direct efficiency comparisons.