From PC World: It’s been four years and change since Valve shook things up with the Steam Deck. In all that time, nearly every single competitor and alternative handheld gaming PC has used an AMD chip. MSI is the only exception, and even it has an AMD alternate model. At Computex 2026, Intel is finally ready to play for real with the Intel Arc G3—it’s just a shame that now is the worst possible time to do so.
AMD’s dominance in this area makes a lot of sense. For a long time, its combined APU platform offered shockingly good integrated graphics for laptops—not enough to unseat a gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU, but enough to play most 3D games with some compromise. The Zen 2 platform (with a few custom tweaks) was perfect for Valve’s own-brand handheld, especially since its efficiency got a boost from the Linux-powered SteamOS. A year later, Asus tapped AMD for more custom chips and the Ryzen Z family debuted, now seen in the ROG Ally, Legion Go, MSI Claw A8, and a few other less notable options.
The Ryzen Z and Z2 series are basically just laptop chips with a bit of extra tuning. They use integrated graphics—good integrated graphics, but still nowhere near a mid-range gaming laptop, so there’s nothing stopping a manufacturer from designing a handheld around an Intel laptop chip, which is what MSI did with the original Claw. A few smaller manufacturers did too, like this OneXPlayer with a Core Ultra 7 chip. But AMD offered chips designed with handhelds in mind first.
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