Intel is finally taking handheld gaming seriously.
At CES 2026, Intel vice president and GM of PC products Daniel Rogers said the company is building a full handheld gaming platform — hardware and software — anchored by a dedicated chip for portable consoles.
The effort is built on Intel’s new Core Series 3 processors, code-named Panther Lake. Those chips were announced last year and are now rolling out into mainstream PCs. The handheld platform will sit on top of that family, with a version specifically tuned for portable gaming devices, Intel confirmed to TechCrunch after initial reporting from IGN.
Panther Lake is important for another reason: it’s the first Intel product line manufactured on the company’s 18A process node, which entered production in 2025. That puts this handheld push at the front of Intel’s next-generation manufacturing roadmap, not as a side project.
Intel has history in gaming. It has been shipping chips for gaming PCs since the 1990s and doubled down in 2022 with its Intel Arc GPUs. But handheld PCs — the Steam Deck–style devices that blur the line between console and laptop — have so far been AMD’s turf.
AMD silicon powers most of the current wave of handhelds. And AMD used the same CES news cycle to flex its muscles, announcing the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, a new processor aimed at gaming PCs, plus fresh ray tracing and graphics technologies.
Against that backdrop, Intel’s move looks less like an experiment and more like an opening bid to challenge AMD in one of the few gaming segments Intel doesn’t already dominate.
Right now, the company is light on specifics. There’s no public timeline for when the dedicated handheld chip will ship, which vendors are on board, or how the software layer will differ from standard Windows gaming setups. Rogers said only that Intel plans to share more details on its handheld gaming products later this year.
The message, though, is clear: as handheld PCs go mainstream, Intel doesn’t want to be just the CPU in someone else’s design. It wants a full platform that OEMs can pick up and brand — and that could set up the next big fight in mobile PC gaming between Intel and AMD.
