Intel launched its long-awaited Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” mobile chips at CES 2026 this week, promising an alluring blend of long battery life and shockingly great integrated graphics performance thanks to its new Arc Xe3 graphics cores. (It’s true! We benchmarked Panther Lake gaming performance ourselves.)
Core Ultra Series 3 is looking pretty damned good, and its strengths could help Intel finally establish a stronger foothold in Steam Deck-style gaming handhelds – a segment long dominated by AMD’s bespoke Ryzen Z1 and Z2 handheld chips. The combo led Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of client product management for Intel, to come out swinging about Panther Lake’s potential advantages 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 told PCWorld’s Mark Hachman in an exclusive interview.
Much like Intel’s Panther logo, Neelalojanan has confident swag about Core Ultra Series 3’s handheld performance.Mark Hachman / Foundry
Bold words indeed… but ones that may have a ring of truth to them, as AMD’s lower tiers of Z2 chips lean on both older CPU tech and older GPU tech to help keep costs down.
Well, it just so happened that Mark also had a roundtable interview scheduled for the very next day with Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of the client business at AMD, to discuss all of the compay’s CES 2026 chip announcements. And naturally, he asked Tikoo about Intel’s comment as part of the far-ranging interview.
Here’s the excerpt, lightly edited for clarity. Be sure to check out the rest of the interview for insights into AMD’s new Ryzen AI 400 laptop lineup, the just-released Ryzen 9 9850X3D and rumors of a dual-core X3D chip, and more.
I just came back from Intel, where they planned to invest heavily in the handheld space, which you’ve dominated. They claim that you’re selling “ancient silicon.” What’s your strategy going forward in the handheld space?
“We’re very committed to the handheld [space]. I mean, we created the space, so it’s a space that we’re very committed to.
Here’s the beauty, though, of AMD and why we have a much higher chance of success in that space: because of our console business, or how we develop semi-custom silicon for the console business. You can’t just use mobile silicon and put it in the handheld. You can, but the handheld or the consoles, they care about high graphics. They don’t care about as much compute, and they don’t care about the I/O.
So, if you’re putting a notebook chip like Panther Lake in there, and you’re not purpose building it, you have all this baggage that Panther Lake is going to carry around its chiplet architecture. You know, the interconnects of the chiplet architecture, the I/O that they have in there. I mean, it’s a Swiss Army Knife, and it’s good for certain things.
We can do that, too. In fact, we do that in the handheld space in some segments. But when you think about the core of the handheld space, they want purpose-designed, purpose-built chips that have great graphics technology, great software like FSR, integration with game developers on Xbox, PlayStation, etc. We can have high battery life, good fidelity of content, high frame rate, and we do that very well.”
Intel believes their low-power E-cores give them an advantage, as they extend battery life. Does AMD have a response to that?
“We haven’t seen any issues there. I’ll tell you this, Intel does play games sometimes, and it’s very interesting.
We had a customer. They said the same thing. They’re like, hey, I can get more battery life with Lunar Lake against the 300 series.
So, we’re like, okay, let’s do a quick experiment. And we did this in the lab. And actually, Qualcomm did a video on this too, because we didn’t want to go out and do a video and everything. Qualcomm did a video on this: Lunar Lake has great battery life when measured with MobileMark with the power connected. As soon as you go in DC Mode, battery life climbs while performance drops. The Core i7 performs like a Core i3.
So, the E-cores are very good for efficiency, very bad for performance. We balance the two, and we’re already making those choices for our customers and saying, hey, you don’t have to worry about it.”
But does that hold true for Panther Lake? We were able to benchmark Core Ultra Series 3 both plugged and unplugged, and the frame rates were surprisingly close in the limited testing available during CES 2026.
So there you have it – it appears a full-fledged war (or at least a war of the words) is brewing for the CPUs beating in the heart of the PC gaming handhelds that have taken the world by storm. Will Panther Lake’s potent Arc graphics manage to unseat AMD’s stranglehold on this new class of devices? Time will tell, but it seems clear that both Intel and AMD aren’t shying away from a fight.
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