Intel's Robert Hallock has confirmed the company's plans to introduce gaming handhelds based on both Arrow Lake-H and Panther Lake CPUs.
Intel Panther Lake is Already in Testing and will be Deployed in Gaming Handhelds Soon
This one is big and it's also official! If you think that Intel is done with gaming handhelds after Lunar Lake, then you need to hear this. In an interview, Intel's VP and GM, Robert Hallock confirmed that Intel planned to not only expand its mobile chips lineup for laptops but also future gaming handhelds.
In an interview with Laptop Mag, Hallock says that it is increasing the 'support network' for handheld manufacturers and will offer them more assistance. As you might be aware of the gaming handheld market, currently there are only two Intel processor series available in gaming handhelds. These are the Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs, which you will find on the MSI Claw series gaming handhelds.
Since, Intel has been working on expanding its APU portfolio by first releasing Meteor Lake, then Lunar Lake and now Arrow Lake-H, it's also planning to collaborate with handheld manufacturers to equip them with better processors. We have already seen that Intel Arrow Lake-H can be even more powerful in gaming with its discrete GPUs than the Lunar Lake chips. However, Panther Lake is going to improve noticeably and is already planned for a 2025 launch.
Those are coming, you know, Arrow [Lake] H has about the same graphics performance as Lunar [Lake] and some of these handhelds are going all the way up to 30 watts now. And Arrow [Lake] fits really nicely in that sort of form factor,"
- Robert Hallock
Up until now, we have only heard about its availability on laptops, but Hallock confirms that Intel will arm game developers with dev kits that will eventually help them transition to faster chips like Panther Lake shortly. As Intel has already confirmed their ongoing testing of Panther Lake chips at CES, Hallock has stated that Intel is collaborating with its partners to ensure the CPUs can be deployed in future gaming handhelds.
Panther Lake is essentially a direct successor to what Lunar [Lake]'s doing,
You saw the [CPU] package get held up at CES, it doesn't have memory on package this time.
That makes it really nice for handheld vendors as well because now they can customize the memory they put in the platform. But we have other technologies that can compensate for the removal of the memory on package, which saves power,
Hallock boasts about Panther Lake's ability to not depend on the built-in memory tile, which will allow handheld makers to increase the memory to whatever capacity they like apart from being able to take care of the speeds and configurations.
It's not clear that Intel isn't going to just stop at Lunar Lake and will surely work on releasing Arrow Lake-H and Panther Lake-based gaming handhelds. This will offer quite a decent challenge to AMD, which has dominated the APU market and has been delivering custom chips to handheld makers for a while now.
