Intel's new Arc G3 chips are built for one thing: handheld gaming

Intel has a new family of processors made specifically for gaming handhelds, and it revealed them at Computex 2026 in Taipei this week. The Arc G-Series marks the first time the company has designed silicon for portable gaming PCs from the ground up, rather than dropping a laptop chip into a smaller body and calling it a day.There are two chips at launch, the Arc G3 and the Arc G3 Extreme. Both are based on Intel's "Panther Lake" architecture and built on the 18A node, and both carry 14 CPU cores: two performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and four low-power efficiency ones. That core mix is the tell. Standard Panther Lake laptop chips ship with four performance cores, so Intel halved that count and set a configurable TDP of 8 to 35 watts, tuning these for the heat and battery limits a handheld lives with.Graphics separate the two chips. The Extreme pairs with the Arc B390 and its 12 Xe3 cores, while the G3 uses the B370 with 10. Both handle XeSS 3 upscaling, multi-frame generation, and hardware ray tracing. Intel's B390 has already impressed in laptops, where Ars Technica clocked it running up to twice as fast as AMD's Radeon 890M, though a thermally tight handheld will likely rein that in.Beyond raw power, Intel is going after the software headache that plagues Windows handhelds. The chips are tuned for Windows 11's full-screen Xbox mode, which keeps you out of the clunky desktop you'd otherwise navigate with thumbsticks. Intel Precompiled Shaders adds to that, pulling game shaders from the cloud to cut loading times and stutter in titles like Black Myth: Wukong and The Outer Worlds 2. The chips also bring Wi-Fi 7 R2, Thunderbolt 4, and dual Bluetooth 6.Acer, MSI, and OneXPlayer are first in line, with the Predator Atlas 8, Claw 8 EX AI+, and a OneXPlayer device arriving from June. Pricing and benchmarks are still unannounced.