Intel is barely in the handheld gaming PC space — but that might be about to change. After the embarrassment that was the first MSI Claw and the excellent MSI Claw 8 AI Plus that followed it, Intel announced it would create custom handheld gaming chips. Today, it’s formally announcing them as the Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme.
There’s a lot we don’t know about the chips, but Intel’s confirming today that the Panther Lake variant contains two fewer CPU cores than Intel’s Panther Lake laptop chips, but feature a full compliment of Xe3 GPU cores to run games. (They have 2 P-cores, 8 E-eores, and 4 LP E-cores, plus up to 12 Xe3 graphics cores in total.)
Image: Intel
Intel will support them with day-0 graphics driver updates as new games come out, and precompiled shaders so you don’t have as much stutter or load time in games, it claims.
And, they’ll feature in at least three handhelds: the leaked MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus, the just-announced OneXPlayer 3 with detachable controllers coming in June, and the just-announced Acer Predator Atlas 8 — which just might wind up being Acer’s first handheld after the Acer Nitro Blaze 7, 8, and gigantic 11 went MIA.
The new Atlas 8 will come in at least two variants, one with an Intel Arc G3 Extreme and its Arc B390 graphics with 12 Xe3 GPU cores, and one with an Intel Arc G3 and the Arc B370 with 10 Xe3 cores instead. Each is paired with 24GB of LPDDR5x RAM at 7467 MT/s, and cooled by “the first metal fan in a handheld” with 89 blades and a claimed 10 percent airflow increase over the competition.
The handheld will weigh around 810 grams (1.79lb) with a large 80Wh battery, or 770 grams (1.7lb) with an above-average 60Wh battery — presumably the higher end model comes with the bigger battery, like competing handhelds do.
The 8-inch screen sounds above average, too. It’s a 1920 x 1200 IPS panel at 16:10 aspect ratio, in a native landscape arrangement, with 500 nits of brightness and 48-120Hz variable refresh rate, covered in Gorilla Glass Victus with Corning’s DXC anti-glare coating with 100 percent sRGB and 77 percent Adobe RGB coverage.
You won’t find magnetic Hall effect or TMR joysticks here, just carbon film ones that might eventually drift, but it does have Hall effect triggers with adjustable hair-trigger stops, two back buttons, and a fingerprint sensor in the power button. It’ll come with Windows 11 and Xbox Mode on up to a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD of the full-length M.2 2280 variety. While we haven’t held it yet, the spec sheet shows it’s roughly an inch thick (28.5mm) at its thinnest point and over two inches thick (58.37mm) at the grips.
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And being an Intel platform, it comes with two Thunderbolt 4 ports (supporting 65W USB-C charging) and Intel’s flavor of Wi-Fi 7, as well as a UHS-II microSD card reader and 3.5mm headset jack.
The company’s not talking battery life or price just yet, but it’s planning to launch the Atlas 8 in October.
Retailer leaks suggest these handhelds could be quite pricey. Unfortunately, that seems to be the way of all handhelds these days: The Steam Deck got a huge price hike just yesterday.
Update, May 28th: Added more info from Intel and OneXPlayer, including confirmation of two more handhelds.
