‘They’re selling ancient silicon’: Intel warns handheld war is coming

AMD may own the handheld PC gaming market, but Intel has plans to steal it back with its Core Ultra Series 3 chip, or Panther Lake. Intel plans to launch a version of Panther Lake later this year specifically for handhelds, executives told PCWorld.com.

AMD’s processors with integrated graphics power the vast majority of handheld PCs, a niche market that has quickly grown as gamers sought cheaper gaming solutions that they could also take on the go.

Intel’s earlier processors have shown up in handheld gaming PCs before; in 2024, Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) was revealed in a handheld before Computex. But Intel’s chip failed to make a dent.

In part, that was because the handheld gaming market was in its infancy, Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of product management for client for Intel, told me in an interview at CES 2026. Today, some of the groundwork has been laid, such as Microsoft enabling a unified full-screen interface for the gaming market.

But today’s Panther Lake chips have an advantage, Neelalojanan said: a return to the low-power E-cores that originally debuted in Intel’s first-generation Core Ultra chips and were passed over in the second-generation Lunar Lake. “We think that the low power E-cores are particularly appropriate for gaming,” he said.

AMD has enjoyed success in handhelds because it has consistently powered game consoles, whose systems-on-a-chip are similar in concept to the SOCs inside handhelds. The ROG Xbox Ally and Lenovo Legion Go both use AMD processors, specifically the Z1 and Z2 chips.

But Neelalojanan also had some blunt words regarding AMD in the handheld gaming market: “They’re selling ancient silicon, while we’re selling up-to-date processors specifically designed for this market.” Or will be selling, anyway.

With the launch of the Core Ultra Series 3 chip, Intel recently sanitized its list of processors, eliminating many of the single-letter suffixes that were a staple of its product listings. Rather than simply take an existing Panther Lake chip and give it to handheld customers, Neelalojanan said that there will be a custom derivative optimized for the market.

Will there be a new Intrel handheld brand, though, or a new family of processors? “You’ll have to wait and see,” Neelalojanan said.