AMD rebuts Intel’s ‘historical silicon’ declare over gaming handhelds

Intel launched its long-awaited Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” cell chips at CES 2026 this week, promising an alluring mix of lengthy battery life and shockingly nice built-in graphics efficiency due to its new Arc Xe3 graphics cores. (It’s true! We benchmarked Panther Lake gaming efficiency ourselves.)

Core Ultra Series 3 is trying fairly damned good, and its strengths may assist Intel lastly set up a stronger foothold in Steam Deck-style gaming handhelds – a phase lengthy dominated by AMD’s bespoke Ryzen Z1 and Z2 handheld chips. The combo led Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of shopper product administration for Intel, to return out swinging about Panther Lake’s potential benefits in tomorrow’s PC gaming handhelds.

“They’re selling ancient silicon, while we’re selling up-to-date processors specifically designed for this market,” Neelalojanan informed PCWorld’s Mark Hachman in an unique interview.

Bold phrases certainly… however ones which will have a hoop of reality to them, as AMD’s decrease tiers of Z2 chips lean on each older CPU tech and older GPU tech to assist maintain prices down.

Well, it simply so occurred that Mark additionally had a roundtable interview scheduled for the very subsequent day with Rahul Tikoo, senior vice chairman and normal supervisor of the shopper enterprise at AMD, to debate the entire compay’s CES 2026 chip bulletins. And naturally, he requested Tikoo about Intel’s remark as a part of the far-ranging interview.

Here’s the excerpt, frivolously edited for readability. Be positive to take a look at the remainder of the interview for insights into AMD’s new Ryzen AI 400 laptop computer lineup, the just-released Ryzen 9 9850X3D and rumors of a dual-core X3D chip, and extra.

I simply got here again from Intel, the place they deliberate to speculate closely within the handheld house, which you’ve dominated. They declare that you simply’re promoting “ancient silicon.” What’s your technique going ahead within the handheld house?

“We’re very dedicated to the hand held [space]. I imply, we created the house, so it’s an area that we’re very dedicated to.

Here’s the wonder, although, of AMD and why we now have a a lot larger probability of success in that house: due to our console enterprise, or how we develop semi-custom silicon for the console enterprise. You can’t simply use cell silicon and put it within the handheld. You can, however the handheld or the consoles, they care about excessive graphics. They don’t care about as a lot compute, and so they don’t care in regards to the I/O.

So, if you happen to’re placing a pocket book chip like Panther Lake in there, and also you’re not objective constructing it, you’ve got all this baggage that Panther Lake goes to hold round its chiplet structure. You know, the interconnects of the chiplet structure, the I/O that they’ve in there. I imply, it’s a Swiss Army Knife, and it’s good for sure issues.

We can try this, too. In reality, we try this within the handheld house in some segments. But when you consider the core of the hand held house, they need purpose-designed, purpose-built chips which have nice graphics expertise, nice software program like FSR, integration with recreation builders on Xbox, PlayStation, and so forth. We can have excessive battery life, good constancy of content material, excessive body fee, and we try this very effectively.”

Intel believes their low-power E-cores give them a bonus, as they lengthen battery life. Does AMD have a response to that?

“We haven’t seen any points there. I’ll inform you this, Intel does play video games generally, and it’s very fascinating.

We had a buyer. They mentioned the identical factor. They’re like, hey, I can get extra battery life with Lunar Lake towards the 300 sequence.

So, we’re like, okay, let’s do a fast experiment. And we did this within the lab. And really, Qualcomm did a video on this too, as a result of we didn’t wish to exit and do a video and every thing. Qualcomm did a video on this: Lunar Lake has nice battery life when measured with CellMark with the ability related. As quickly as you go in DC Mode, battery life climbs whereas efficiency drops. The Core i7 performs like a Core i3.

So, the E-cores are superb for effectivity, very unhealthy for efficiency. We steadiness the 2, and we’re already making these decisions for our prospects and saying, hey, you don’t have to fret about it.”

But does that maintain true for Panther Lake? We had been capable of benchmark Core Ultra Series 3 each plugged and unplugged, and the body charges had been surprisingly shut within the restricted testing out there throughout CES 2026.

So there you’ve got it – it seems a full-fledged battle (or no less than a battle of the phrases) is brewing for the CPUs beating within the coronary heart of the PC gaming handhelds which have taken the world by storm. Will Panther Lake’s potent Arc graphics handle to unseat AMD’s stranglehold on this new class of gadgets? Time will inform, nevertheless it appears clear that each Intel and AMD aren’t shying away from a struggle.