Intel's new Panther Lake-powered gaming handhelds should offer similar perf to PS6 handheld APU

Intel launched its new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" CPUs at CES 2026 last week, and it looks like the new Panther Lake-powered gaming handhelds should offer performance close to what we'll see out of Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 handheld.

In a new post on X by leaker @Kepler_L2 who posted: "PTL handhelds might be a great ballpark estimate for how PS6 Handheld will perform/how PS5 games can be scaled down to very low TDP. Z2E is too slow and Strix Halo is too fast, but PTL @ 30W should be very similar to Canis @ 15W".

Panther Lake has a fantastic integrated GPU in the form of the Arc B390 with 12 Xe3 GPU cores that provides some great performance, a good chunk of CPU cores, and the NPU. In its handheld SKU form, we should expect Intel to cut the fat (NPU) and keep the gold (CPU + GPU) and then it can be fully unleashed for next-gen gaming handhelds.

• Read more: PS6 handheld full specs: Zen 6 CPU + RDNA 5 GPU + faster than a PS5
• Read more: PS6 handheld early perf leaks: nearly 3x faster than Nintendo Switch 2 in docked mode
• Read more: PS6 handheld early specs: runs PS5 + PS4 games, Zen 6 + RDNA 5, beats Xbox Ally X

The leaker said that Panther Lake @ 30W should be similar to the semi-custom "Canis" APU for the PS6 handheld @ 15W, which is half the TDP.

Remember: Sony is heavily involved with the semi-custom APUs that it has AMD design for their PlayStation consoles and soon handhelds, as well as running its own proprietary OS, and the fact that Canis is optimized only for playing games from its first-party developers.

• Read more: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs launched: Panther Lake powers next-gen laptops
• Read more: Intel Arc B390 GPU on Panther Lake CPUs: up to 77% faster gaming than AMD, Qualcomm
• Read more: Intel's new Panther Lake CPUs fabbed in-house Intel 18A node on American soil

I can see Intel tuning its Panther Lake SKU for gaming handhelds, dropping the NPU will help, dropping the clock speeds as well would be great to see for power savings, and I'm sure there are some other tricks that Intel can perform to get some kick-ass performance at the 15-20W TDP mark.