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Intel is reportedly planning a major launch of its Panther Lake chipset for gaming handhelds under the Arc G3 brand at Computex, which is kicking off in a week's time. We previously reported on the news a month ago, where we speculated that Acer, GDP, OneXPlayer and MSI could be part of the initial announcement given their links to Intel, and now it seems that at least one of those names is as good as confirmed.
Videocardz is now reporting that Acer is set to unveil the Predator Atlas 8, an eight-inch Arc handheld that seems to slot between the Blaze 8 and Blaze 11 handhelds that were announced with Ryzen processors in 2025 but never made it to market.
It's not clear whether the Atlas 8 will use Arc 3 or the more powerful Arc 3 Extreme chipset, though it's possible that both varieties will be available. Given that Acer has only shipped a single gaming handheld, a lone follow-up seems more likely, especially as RAM and SSD price upgrades could make it hard to offer a meaningful differentiation between two models.
As a reminder, the Arc 3 chipset includes a 14-core configuration, including two performance cores, eight efficiency cores and four low power cores, with 10 Xe3 graphics cores (on the Arc 3) or 12 Xe3 cores (on the Arc 3 Extreme). With package power mooted to hit 65W at full tilt on the Arc 3 and 80W on the Arc 3 Extreme, these could be quite performant devices while plugged into the wall - and still reasonably efficient when on battery power.
We were quite impressed with Panther Lake in laptops, as you can see in the video above, so hopefully the handheld edition continues that form.
What do you make of the rumours as they stand now - do you welcome competition from Intel in the handheld space, or has AMD's (many) Ryzen chipsets got the form factor sewn up? Let us know in the comments below.