All of us in the hardware team at PC Gamer love a good handheld gaming PC, be it a Valve Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally X, or an MSI [[link]] Claw 8 AI. Whether you want long-life portable playability or outright performance, there's something for everyone in the market. Nearly all of them use an AMD processor, but the Claw 8 AI stands out for using an Intel Lunar Lake chip. But if rumours are to be believed, its next iteration will join the crowd and sport an AMD Z2 Extreme.
While this news has just popped up via Igor's Lab, the first suggestion of this happening appeared back in January, from X user CodeCommando. The current version of MSI's Claw 8 AI+ handheld sports an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor—better known by its architecture name, Lunar Lake, this is an eight-core, eight-thread chip with a Battlemage integrated GPU.
That will probably give it the edge over the Lunar Lake chip in the current Claw 8 but not by a huge margin, as the Z2 Extreme will still be limited to 35 W. Not that it really matters as the main reason why MSI would want to change the processor is to earn more money from each unit it sells, even accounting for the fact that it will need to completely redesign the motherboard and cooling system.
Naturally, we'd just prefer to have a cheaper Claw 8 but I suspect MSI will want to stick to the same price point, as it already markets its handheld as being a high-end model. Obviously, we'll just have to wait and see what MSI eventually releases but I'll be a little sad to see Lunar Lake disappear. It's a brilliant little chip, with far more poke than you'd think but it's also a bit too expensive for the market it's intended for.
