Intel’s in trouble — AMD’s Ryzen Z2 Extreme pulls ahead where it counts for handheld gaming

One of the big focuses of handheld gaming PCs like Valve’s Steam Deck or the ROG Xbox Ally is on not just power, but efficiency. In something so small, its critical that the chipsets inside are able to offer impressive frame rates while slow-sipping that battery juice.

It's always been an important tradeoff since the advent of laptops, but smaller devices requiring more power have brought it into a sharper focus. Now it appears that AMD’s Z2 Extreme has leapfrogged Intel’s Core Ultra 7 258V, as seen in new gaming benchmarks comparing the AMD-armed MSI Claw A8 and the Intel-ified MSI Claw 8 AI+.

Is AMD pulling ahead of Intel?

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the tide could be turning somewhat in AMD’s favor. Intel's Lunar Lake chip has been impressive at medium wattages, but Team Red has surpassed it.

That delta has not only shrunk, but it’s now gone entirely when the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme and the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V are both running at 17W, with a new video on Bilibili.com showing the Z2 Extreme pulling away in the likes of Resident Evil Village and Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord, while staying relatively consistent for other test titles.

With the Z2 Extreme in the MSI Claw A8 and the Core 7 Ultra 258V in the MSI Claw 8 AI+, this is a great chance to see how the two stack up in comparatively priced devices.

It’s perhaps no surprise to see the Z2 Extreme performing above expectations, given that it’s AMD’s top-of-the-line handheld system-on-chip (SoC) and has eight cores, sixteen threads, and runs at up to 5GHz.

The SoC sees an 80 percent improvement on last year’s Z1 Extreme at 10 watts, managing more than 20 FPS in GR Extreme benchmarking, but it’s not all good news. As Tom’s Hardware points out, once the SoC hit its default power configuration, frame rates actually began to drop.

It seems the SoC was taking power away from the GPU, but locking the SPPT (Slow Package Power Tracking) to 48W seemingly alleviated the issue.

Performance 🤝 Power efficiency

Given the understandable furore over Monster Hunter Wilds’ PC performance, it’s impressive to see the game running at just over 30 FPS in 1080p at 17W on the Ryzen Z2, but Capcom’s action title wasn’t alone.

Far Cry 6 and Cyberpunk 2077 saw smaller gains, but Resident Evil Village was almost 8 FPS better off on the Z2 Extreme than the Intel SoC, leading to an 8.5% average lead across the four titles.

If nothing else, this comparison does suggest that customers deciding between the MSI Claw A8 and the Claw 8 AI+ will have increased headroom from the former.

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