Arc G3 Processor Series Detailed: Purpose-built for Gaming Handhelds, Packs the Best of Intel

Intel today formally launched the Arc G3 series, a series of fully-integrated SoCs for gaming handhelds out to compete with AMD Ryzen Z-series. Intel felt the need for such a product line when it observed OEMs using U-segment mobile processors for handheld consoles. The Arc G3 features a tailored balance of CPU compute, and graphics muscle, generally favoring the latter, with power management that’s fine-tuned for typical handheld gaming use-cases. This time around, Intel also made the effort to co-engineer devices with OEMs so their battery-life and thermals have knowhow from Intel.

Intel tapped into its latest “Panther Lake” microarchitecture to create the Arc G3 series. The company claims performance up to 42% higher than the competition (being AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme based on “Strix Point”); with as much as 11 hours of gameplay on battery, and support for XBOX mode. It also brings the full stack of Intel Arc innovations such as XeSS 3 upscaling, frame-generation, and low-latency, the GPU provides full DirectX 12 Ultimate acceleration. Also on the software side, the console gets day-0 game optimization from Intel, along with pre-compiled shaders. Intel also brings segment-first connectivity features such as Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 7.

At the silicon level, the Arc G3 is a heavily modified version of “Panther Lake-U,” with a Compute tile built on the Intel 18A foundry node. The Compute tile features a 2P+8E CPU complex, while the SoC tile has four additional low-power island E-cores. The P-cores are Intel’s latest “Coyote Cove” cores, while the E-cores and LPE-cores are “Darkmont,” both of which are optimized updates to the previous “Lion Cove” and “Skymont” cores, respectively. Both the Arc G3 Extreme and Arc G3 have the same CPU configuration. Each of the two P-cores has 3 MB of L2 cache, while each of the three E-core clusters has 4 MB of L2 cache shared among the four E-cores of the cluster. The two P-cores and two E-core clusters of the Compute tiles share a 12 MB L3 cache.The Graphics tile, which contains the main number crunching machinery of the iGPU, is built on the TSMC N3B (3 nm EUV) foundry node. The iGPU is based on the Xe3 “Celestial” graphics architecture, and this tile contains 12 Xe cores. Arc G3 Extreme gets all 12 cores, while the Arc G3 gets 10 cores. Proportionately, there are either 96 or 80 XMX engines, and 12 or 10 Ray Tracing units. Intel has also given the iGPU a fairly large 16 MB L2 cache.The SoC tile, besides the 4 “Darkmont” low-power island E-cores, has the iGPU’s display controllers and media acceleration engines. This tile also features the memory controller with an LPDDR5X-8533 memory interface cushioned by an 8 MB memory-side cache. The tile also contains a 45 TOPS NPU 5 unit that meets Copilot+ local acceleration requirements.Intel put out first-party performance numbers for the Arc G3 Extreme, compared with previous-generation Core Ultra 258V “Lunar Lake-MX” and the current rival, AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme. Intel claims up to 44% higher frame rates averaged across games, and up to 24% higher performance at 17 W sustained. The big claim here is that Intel offers similar performance at half the power of Ryzen Z2 Extreme or 2x performance at same power.

We’ve gone through three of the first handheld consoles implementing the Arc G3 Extreme.

The complete slide deck follows.