Overview
- At CES, Intel said it is building a handheld gaming platform that pairs hardware and software and includes a dedicated Panther Lake variant for portable devices.
- Panther Lake, branded Core Ultra Series 3, is Intel’s first family produced on the 18A process, with production beginning in 2025.
- Hands-on sessions reported by PCWorld found the Arc B390 iGPU approaching recent entry discrete laptop GPUs in some games, with XeSS upscaling and multi‑frame generation dramatically boosting frame rates.
- Third‑party tests cited by PCGamesN showed up to roughly 78% higher performance in Cyberpunk 2077 versus an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 system in specific settings, though results relied on features like XeSS and were limited to early demos.
- AMD’s Rahul Tikoo argued Intel’s comparisons are not a fair fight and pointed to Strix Halo/Ryzen AI Max for higher graphics performance, after an Intel executive characterized AMD’s handheld chips as “ancient silicon.”