Intel Arc G3 Extreme Pummels Ryzen Z2 Extreme in Benchmark Leak

If you haven't put hands on a mobile device with an Intel Panther Lake processor yet, even the 4-Xe3-core configuration is surprisingly spry when it comes to gaming. The "X" models with the larger 12-core GPU are downright speedy, and generally obviate the case for entry-level discrete GPUs in laptops. Naturally, we're excited about Intel's Arc G3 chips, which are reportedly what the company is going to call the handheld-focused version of Panther Lake. Now we have a couple of leaks that lend credence to those rumors.

First up, Italian electronic retailer Ollo posted a listing for ... well, we'll just show you:


Yeah, that's pretty clear-cut. A new MSI Claw, seemingly based on the same fundamental design as the Claw 8 AI+ we previously reviewed, in a new colorway with the new SoC inside. This is very welcome, as our biggest complaints with the MSI Claw 8 AI+ were its looks and the fact that it barely existed at retail. But Lunar Lake was seemingly a relatively limited production run, and so it's hard to fault MSI there. The listing includes surprisingly complete specifications including the presence of 32GB of RAM, a 120-Hz 1920×1200 IPS LCD touchscreen, and an 80-Whr battery, all of which match the original Claw 8 AI+.

This machine was posted with a list price of 1599€, which is around $1875 USD. That is unbelievably expensive; for that kind of money you're getting dangerously close to something like the Ayaneo Next II with its AMD Ryzen AI Max+ processor. Now, these are nearly different classes of device, with the Claw 8 EX likely offering two to three times the battery life while gaming (just based on the TDPs of the SoCs in question), but the Ryzen AI Max+ processor in the Ayaneo will offer nearly double the gaming performance, too. Hopefully that's just a preliminary or placeholder price.


Meanwhile, a listing has appeared over at PassMark for the Intel Arc G3 Extreme. It's just one result, and it's PassMark, so we need to take it with a grain of salt, but in that site's CPU Mark rating, the Arc G3 Extreme is handily surpassing both of AMD's most popular extant handheld chips, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and Ryzen Z2 Extreme. The difference is (unsurprisingly) larger in the multi-core rating, where Intel's upcoming chip outpaces the Ryzen Z1 Extreme by some 17% and beats the slower Ryzen Z2 Extreme by about 21%. The more important single-core results are closer, with the Ryzen Z2 Extreme able to flex its newer Zen 5 architecture to put the Arc G3 Extreme less than 8% ahead as the Ryzen Z1 Extreme trails behind by a considerable margin at 18% slower.


None of this is really a surprise, but there are a lot of unknowns here; we don't know what clock rates or power limit the Arc G3 Extreme was running, we don't know if it was on a test bench or actually in a device, and so on. It is interesting to note that it's listed as having 14 cores, matching the earlier leaks with a 2+8+4 configuration. We're dying to see how games respond to this setup; Cougar Cove is damn fast, but there's only two of those cores here. Darkmont is no slouch, though, and eight cores is still a lot of CPU cores. Remember when eight cores was an insane number of CPU cores? How times change.