Credit: Intel

Most of the Steam Deck imitators on the market right now use AMD silicon, specifically the Ryzen Z-series chips. These are the same chips AMD makes for regular laptops, but with different power settings better suited to a compact handheld system. There are handhelds based on Intel silicon (MSI’s Claw is the main one), but Intel hasn’t yet tried making silicon marketed specifically for that purpose.

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.

The two chips in the Intel Arc G-series use similar technologies to the Core Ultra Series 3 chips but don’t share exactly the same specs.
Credit: Intel

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.

Intel’s press release mentions Windows 11’s Xbox Mode but not Valve’s SteamOS, which to date has only shipped on AMD-based PCs. But the recent SteamOS 3.8 preview mentioned “improved support” for both AMD- and Intel-based systems and included fixes targeting the MSI Claw. SteamOS might need more updates before becoming compatible with brand-new Intel chips like the Arc G-series, but if you prefer Valve’s gaming OS to Windows, it seems likely you’ll eventually be able to try SteamOS on these Intel chips.