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

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

Core Extremely Sequence 3 is wanting fairly damned good, and its strengths might 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 promoting historical silicon, whereas we’re promoting up-to-date processors particularly designed for this market,” Neelalojanan advised PCWorld’s Mark Hachman in an unique interview.

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

Effectively, it simply so occurred that Mark additionally had a roundtable interview scheduled for the very subsequent day with Rahul Tikoo, senior vp 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.

Right here’s the excerpt, frivolously edited for readability. Make sure you try 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 take a position closely within the handheld area, which you’ve dominated. They declare that you just’re promoting “historical silicon.” What’s your technique going ahead within the handheld area?

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

Right here’s the wonder, although, of AMD and why we’ve got a a lot greater probability of success in that area: due to our console enterprise, or how we develop semi-custom silicon for the console enterprise. You possibly can’t simply use cellular silicon and put it within the handheld. You possibly 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, in the event you’re placing a pocket book chip like Panther Lake in there, and also you’re not objective constructing it, you have got all this baggage that Panther Lake goes to hold round its chiplet structure. You already know, the interconnects of the chiplet structure, the I/O that they’ve in there. I imply, it’s a Swiss Military Knife, and it’s good for sure issues.

We are able to try this, too. The truth is, we try this within the handheld area in some segments. However when you consider the core of the hand held area, they need purpose-designed, purpose-built chips which have nice graphics expertise, nice software program like FSR, integration with sport builders on Xbox, PlayStation, and many others. We are able to have excessive battery life, good constancy of content material, excessive body price, 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 let you know this, Intel does play video games generally, and it’s very attention-grabbing.

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 collection.

So, we’re like, okay, let’s do a fast experiment. And we did this within the lab. And truly, Qualcomm did a video on this too, as a result of we didn’t need to exit and do a video and all the pieces. Qualcomm did a video on this: Lunar Lake has nice battery life when measured with MobileMark with the facility 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 dangerous for efficiency. We stability the 2, and we’re already making these selections for our clients and saying, hey, you don’t have to fret about it.”

However does that maintain true for Panther Lake? We had been capable of benchmark Core Extremely Sequence 3 each plugged and unplugged, and the body charges had been surprisingly shut within the restricted testing obtainable throughout CES 2026.

So there you have got it – it seems a full-fledged struggle (or at the very least a struggle 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, but it surely appears clear that each Intel and AMD aren’t shying away from a struggle.