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Today, the company is throwing its hat in the ring with two Intel Arc G-series processors, which will allow gaming handhelds to leverage the company’s genuinely quite good Arc B-series integrated GPUs. Intel says that several Arc G-series handhelds will arrive “starting in June 2026, with broader availability throughout the year.” These systems will include a new MSI Claw model, a Predator Atlas 8 from Acer, and a device from OneXPlayer.

Intel normally uses its “Arc” branding for integrated and dedicated GPUs, but in this case, the “Arc” brand encompasses the entire chip, including the CPU, GPU, NPU, and other components.

The G-series chips are similar in many ways to the Core Ultra Series 3 chips (codenamed Panther Lake) that Intel is currently shipping in high-end thin-and-light laptops. They use the same CPU and GPU architectures and make use of Intel’s 18A manufacturing process (among others). But they ship with a slightly different combination of CPU and GPU cores that doesn’t quite match up with any of the Core Ultra processors.

Both the Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme include 14 CPU cores: two high-performance P-cores, eight E-cores, and four lower-power LP E-cores. The main difference is the GPU; the Arc G3 Extreme uses a fully enabled Arc B390 GPU with 12 Xe cores, while the Arc G3 includes an Arc B370 GPU with 10 Xe cores. The G Extreme also has slightly higher CPU and GPU clock speeds and marginally higher maximum power draw. Both chips also include a neural processing unit (NPU) fast enough to support Windows 11’s Copilot+ features, if you plan to dock your handheld and use it like a regular Windows PC.

In our testing, the Arc B390 GPU could run up to twice as fast as AMD’s Radeon 890M, a close relative of the best GPU available in the Ryzen Z series. But that performance was heavily dependent on how much power the chip was allowed to use, and the lower TDP and smaller heatsinks in a gaming handheld may limit its performance somewhat. AMD still hasn’t shipped any integrated GPUs that take advantage of its newest RDNA4 graphics architecture, and its RDNA3 architecture is several years old, which has given Intel an opening here.

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