The battle for the heart of next-gen handheld gaming PCs: AMD's Strix Point versus Intel's Lunar Lake

Verily, the dust has settled on the orgy of silicon, frenzied capitalism and silly AI marketing straplines that was the. All that's left bar the intriguing and quite possibly lethal cocktail of air-travel contracted pathogens currently laying waste to the post-Computex PCG team is to decide what to make of it all.

On the other hand, CPU core count and indeed outright CPU grunt isn't always critical in a handheld gaming context. What you want is enough CPU power without murdering the battery. Eight cores is usually plenty for gaming, especially if those cores are quick. Adding more and more cores only gets more problematic when it comes to power consumption.

TSMC's revised N3E node that debuted with the Apple M4 chip about a month ago, but isn't currently used in any other CPU or GPU, does look quite a bit better. But Intel still has N3B to AMD's N4 silicon in Strix Point. And N4 is merely a revision and rebrand of TSMC's N5 node. So, Intel has a clear node advantage and that typically bodes well for power consumption.

All of which means from a CPU and chip architecture perspective that it looks like Intel will have an efficiency advantage. Since both chips seem likely to have sufficient CPU performance for gaming, that's advantage Intel on the CPU side. AMD's Strix Point will very likely have the more powerful CPU, but it won't make much difference to your handheld frame rates.

The caveat to that is Intel's graphics driver quality. It's much, much improved from the train wreck of patchy performance that was the original Intel Arc graphics family at launch. But you'd still give AMD the clear advantage when it comes to performance consistency over a suite of games. The bottom line, then, goes something like this. Intel seems like it has put more effort into efficiency than AMD and a handheld based on Lunar Lake could end up offering significantly better battery life than the AMD Strix Point competition as a result.

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