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

HardwareProcessorsThe battle for the heart of next-gen handheld gaming PCs: AMD’s Strix Point versus Intel’s Lunar LakeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: AMD and Intel)

Lunar versus Strix

Verily, the dust has settled on the orgy of silicon, frenzied capitalism and silly AI marketing straplines that was the2024 Computex show in Taiwan. 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.

To be even more specific, which of the two do we think has the makings of the better chip for the next generation ofgaming PC handhelds? Because it’s almost certainly handhelds where these chips will have the biggest gaming impact.

We already have mobile CPUs that are plenty good enough for gaming in laptops. In laptops, you want a good dedicated GPU, so the integrated graphics in these new chips from Intel and AMD isn’t terribly important for gaming in that form factor. But in a handheld? It’ll all happen on that one chip.

In some ways, they’re a bit of a mismatch, Lunar Lake and Strix Point.AMD’s new Ryzen AI 300, as Strix Point is branded, has 12 CPU cores to Intel’s eight. It’s a bit more complicated than that as both chips have two types of CPU core. But in raw processing terms, you’d think AMD has the clear edge.

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.

So, efficiency is where Intel scores its first on-paper points. Intel seems to have absolutely pulled the stops out with Lunar Lake to make it power efficient. For starters, it has on-package memory, which is a clear efficiency move even if it does make post-purchase memory upgrades impossible.

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Intel has pulled out the efficiency stops for its new Lunar Lake APU(Image credit: Intel)

Intel Lunar Lake

Intel has also wound back on its chiplet approach with Lunar Lake. It only has two active chiplets, where Meteor Lake has four. All of the really important, power-hungry bits are located in the main compute tile. Inter-tile comms and operations are generally more power hungry than intra-tile comms and operations, so fewer chiplets is likely a good thing for efficiency, too.

For sure, AMD’s APU is a single-chip monolithic design, which is generally the best approach for efficiency, but the point is that Intel seems to have minimised its disadvantage there. Perhaps most importantly, that big compute tile in Lunar Lake isbuilt on TSMC’s N3B node, which is just about the most advanced silicon currently available. In truth, N3B hasn’t impressed all that much with Apple’s M3 chips.

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.

Intel’s Lunar Lake also has what you might call a full-on hybrid CPU architecture. Intel’s Performance and Efficient cores are of quite different designs, with the latter very much optimised for low power consumption.

Intel also claims to have made huge strides with the performance of its Efficient cores in Lunar Lake, which are now said to be on par for IPC with the Raptor Cove Performance cores in its fastest current desktop CPUs, such as theCore i9 14900K.

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.

Instead, those frame rates will likely hinge on the other major part of the chip, the iGPU or integrated graphics. This aspect is much harder to judge. In some ways we have a better idea of what AMD is bringing. Strix Point will top out with 16 graphics compute units, up from 12 in the old Hawk Point APU seen in various existing handheld gaming rigs, like the troubledAsus ROG Ally.

But could AMD’s Strix Point have the edge for frame rates?(Image credit: AMD)

AMD Strix Point APU chip, held in a hand, with the reflected light showing the various processing blocks in the chip die

However, the iGPU in Strix Point has also been upgraded from AMD RDNA 3 spec toRDNA 3.5. In truth, we don’t have many details as to what RDNA 3.5 means versus the existing RDNA 3 graphics architecture. But one recurring rumour is that RDNA 3.5 has a hefty boost in ray tracing performance. We hope that’s true, because in all other regards, RDNA 3 hardware is very good. And RT upgrade is just what it needs to be great.

As for Intel’s Lunar Lake iGPU, that’s much more of an unknown. Intel has said two things of note. First the iGPU in Lunar Lake has eight EU or graphics execution units, the same number as the existingMeteor Lake mobile chipthat was used to arguable effect in the MSI Claw gaming handheld, along with a zillion laptops.

But that’s eight of Intel’s new Battlemage spec EUs, where Meteor Lake leverages the Xe-LPG architecture, more akin to the Alchemist graphics architecture. Again, we justdon’t know how good Battlemage is, our first experience of it will be when Lunar Lake is released later this year.

That said, Intel’s second revelation regarding Battlemage in Lunar Lake is a claimed 50% performance uplift in gaming performance over Meteor Lake. At the same time, AMD’s old Hawk Point was generally a bit faster than Meteor Lake. So when you triangulate all the available data points, well, it’s looking pretty tight when it comes to raw iGPU performance.

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.

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