For the past several years, AMD chips have been the gold standard, powering nearly every handheld gaming PC on the market. That dominance is now under threat, as Intel has formally committed to challenging its rival in this promising segment in 2026. Intel argues that its power-efficient CPU cores and stronger machine-learning capabilities will give it a competitive edge, while AMD fires back by pointing to its long experience designing console-class hardware.
A Dispute Over "Ancient Silicon" and Power Efficiency
The war of words broke out at CES this week, when Nish Neelalojanan, an Intel executive, bluntly accused AMD of using "ancient silicon" in the accelerated processing units (APUs) for its handheld gaming devices. He also argued that when Intel introduces handheld APUs based on the Panther Lake processor with Xe3 Arc integrated graphics, the company's power-efficient E-cores will deliver better battery life than AMD's Ryzen AI 300 and 400 series processors.
The sharp remarks came right after Intel announced its Core Ultra Series 3, codenamed Panther Lake, laptop processors. Intel claims that Panther Lake's top integrated GPU, the Arc B390, far outperforms the Radeon 890M from AMD in thin-and-light laptops. It remains unclear, however, whether the Arc B390 - or a variant of it - can achieve similar gains at the low wattage typical of handheld devices.
By "ancient silicon," Neelalojanan most likely meant the RDNA 3.5 architecture of the Radeon 890M, which lacks dedicated machine-learning acceleration. Machine learning is the main reason upscaling technologies such as XeSS from Intel and DLSS from Nvidia tend to produce cleaner, sharper images than AMD's FSR 3. AMD's latest RDNA 4 architecture does add machine-learning support to enable the improved FSR 4, but that technology is currently limited to the company's newest desktop GPUs.
Console Chip Experience and the Future of APUs
Responding to Intel's comments, AMD's Rahul Tikoo told PC World that the efficiency of Intel's E-cores actually comes at the expense of performance. "A Core i7 chip performs no differently than a Core i3," he quipped. Tikoo also stressed AMD's deep experience designing chips with optimizations built specifically for gaming. Across the last two generations of PlayStation and three generations of Xbox, AMD has supplied custom APUs designed for demanding gaming workloads. The company also designed the APU for Valve's Steam Deck, and other recent handheld gaming devices rely on AMD's Z1 and Z2 processors, which are optimized for high gaming performance.
While Intel has yet to reveal how its handheld Panther Lake APUs will differ from the CES demos, Tikoo predicted that its rival may simply reuse netbook components with no special tuning for compute performance or I/O connectivity. Intel also hasn't confirmed rumors that it is developing a product to take on AMD's Strix Halo, a high-end iGPU with near-console performance.
Looking further ahead, the $5 billion partnership between Intel and Nvidia could eventually produce APUs that pair Core Ultra CPUs with RTX-class iGPU cores. Such chips would likely compete directly with AMD's upcoming RDNA 5 architecture, promising significant improvements in machine learning, ray tracing, and path-tracing performance, and opening a new era for compact gaming devices.
