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Handhelds aren’t exactly the most exciting devices right now given just how prohibitively expensive they’ve become, but you’d better bet my ears perk up a little when I hear of more possible budget-oriented hardware. That’s what we could soon have from Intel, if prolific hardware leaker Jaykihn’s recent X post is correct.
Decoding the string of numbers, according to Jaykihn, Intel will release a Panther Lake chip with four Performance-cores, no Efficient-cores, four low-power Efficient cores, and most crucially, four Xe cores. Ie, four GPU cores.
Earlier this year, Intel announced the Arc G3 and G3 Extreme processors, aimed squarely at the handheld market. These scaled back the CPU cores but kept plenty of those juicy Xe GPU cores in there—10 and 12, respectively.
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Prior to this, to get such Xe cores you had to have, at minimum, the four P-Cores, eight E-Cores, and four LPE-Cores in the Core Ultra X7 358H. The G3 Extreme cut this down to just two P-Cores, and the same number of E-Cores and LPE-Cores. In other words, less CPU grunt but just as much GPU grunt.
Our Dave got his mitts on a handheld with the G3 Extreme in earlier this year and was very impressed. He’s since reviewed it and, setting aside its price tag for a moment, remained impressed. The 12 Xe cores really do deliver when crammed into small devices like handheld gaming PCs.
The problem, however, is pricing. Handhelds in general have shot up in price over the past few months, and the G3 Extreme is proving no exception to this. A handheld with one of these in can cost just as much as a midrange or even high-end gaming PC, even given the current inflated PC market. There’s no need to mince our words: handheld gaming PCs are cooked right now.
So, if Intel does bring out a Panther Lake chip with just four Xe cores, it could—one would hope—stand a chance of sitting in some less ridiculously-priced but also less-performant handhelds. However, to echo Gandalf’s wise words to Pippin: perhaps that’s just a fool’s hope. Because after all, it’s a memory shortage we’re in, not a processor shortage, and the handhelds will still have to secure expensive memory and storage. If Intel ditches the G-series branding, it can get away with slower memory, at least.
We’ll just have to wait and see. Scaling all the way back to four Xe cores will put it behind even the eight Xe cores in the previous gen Core Ultra 7 258V’s Arc 140V, which adorned the then-high-end MSI Claw 8 AI+ A2VM. Though the new one, if it comes to fruition, would have newer Xe3 cores compared to the latter’s Xe2 cores, so it wouldn’t be apples-to-apples. At any rate, the main question will be the mainstay for 2026: pricing.
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