Intel Arc G3 interview transcript — Intel's Senior Product Director talks new handheld chips, Arrow Lake Refresh, and RTX Spark
Intel’s Arc G3 chips are gunning for the AMD-dominated, high-tier integrated graphics market that has become such an important enabler of the modern handheld PC gaming experience. But as high-memory prices push up the costs of even entry-level discrete GPUs, there could be much more of a place for powerful onboard graphics in the PC gaming landscape in the years to come.
We sat down with Intel’s Senior Director of Product Management, Nish Neelalojanan, in Taipei, Taiwan, at Computex 2026 to talk more about the G3’s development and how it fits into Intel’s lineup. Here, we're presenting the full transcript of our conversation.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jake Roach, Tom's Hardware: So what was the idea behind the G3, because you guys have tried before, right? I believe it was with MSI? And now you’re putting a bigger emphasis behind it with a whole new branding.
Nish Neelalojanan, Director of Product Management, Intel: It was a combination of two things. So first of all, we started trying already with Meteor Lake, and yes, we were experimenting. This was all standard off-the-shelf parts, and we learned a lot as we came into Lunar Lake. The power management for handheld needed to be more customized, so we started tweaking further, and as we got into Panther Lake, the architecture lent itself to lower power gaming. We moved the E-Cores onto the performance cluster, so you have E-Cores both on your efficiency island and your performance cluster, that means your E-Cores have access to L3 cache, so E-Cores are now performant enough to run games.
A lot of the time, in a low-power scenario, you are more GPU-bound than CPU-bound because the GPU is power starved, so if you can reduce the power on CPU and dump it on the GPU, you'll get much better performance. So, with that architecture change with Panther Lake, now is the perfect time. All the goodness we've learned, we can capitalize on it. We have a silicon architecture, we can lend itself to low power, and we have big enough graphics now…
Jake Roach: A really impressive iGPU.
Nish Neelalojanan: So, that is what had the impetus on, hey, what if we did a CPU line, which is graphics first, or leading with a very big graphics, but small enough CPU that doesn't grab enough power, but good enough to run all your handheld games. It's great for handheld gaming or non-PC form factor, running low-power gaming. So we wanted to start a line of products, which would be integrated graphics forward, with the right CPU.
Jake Roach: And these are wholly unique entries, right? If I remember correctly, there's no 14-core Panther Lake.
Nish Neelalojanan: These are completely unique chips. So they are based off the same die, but we've optimized it with, like I said, core count, so that taking two P-Cores off, because most of the games are going to run on the E-Cores on the performance cluster, you also cut down on different I/Os, so you don't need as many ports on a handheld as you would need on a laptop, right, so you cut down, so it's cutting down all the things you don't need.
Jake Roach: Really focusing it on that form factor.
Nish Neelalojanan: Yeah, that will be on the hardware, and then software-wise, we have a lot of other software optimization. So, now in order to have them pinned onto the E-Core, we have a BIOS control optimizer, so extra ways to have your thread director direct your game threads onto your E-Cores.
It's basically making sure we are directing the game threads onto the E-Core. [We also have the] ability to do power gating, so that we have features like endurance gaming, which we had on the laptops. Now, for handheld, we've added some features, so you can go with different presets. You can say, I want 60 frames per second, and then it will optimize your profile accordingly, or I want 30 frames per second. So you have a frame cap, and then your SOC resourcing is optimized, so that you will increase your battery life 2, 3, 4, hours.
Jake Roach: Battery life is so important for a handheld, right? I was playing a little Forza Horizon 6 on the plane coming over, and one way that I'm doing that right now on Linux is with Lossless Scaling, with frame generation in any game. As you're saying, apply that 30 fps cap frame generation to the mix, and you can get really good perceived performance.
Right now, you guys have multi-frame generation through XeSS 3 through specific games, but there's no driver. Is that something you're looking into, given how important that can be for the local gaming experience?
Nish Neelalojanan: So, 100 plus games have already enabled MFG, but you could imagine, as you said, it's important. So we're exploring, but as we get closer, we'll talk more about when and where it intercepts.
Jake Roach: The other thing I did want to ask about was form factors, which is something you kind of hinted at. Right now, with component prices being so high on just a typical DIY PC, we're seeing a really big push for budget laptops for people that maybe don't need as big of graphics and handhelds for people that really care about gaming as a laptop replacement. I'm just curious, kind of broadly, what you think about the dynamics between these form factors? Is this something that is just a temporary market connection, given that prices are so expensive, and are you planning around that, or is it something more long-term? Where do you think these are going to be the preferred form factors?
Nish Neelalojanan: I think, from a budget-conscious perspective of value buyers, our core 300 series, I think probably this is the first time in a long time the mainstream is getting some of the new ideas, right? So, today if you take a value-conscious segment in the past, it was always, hey, you have the big innovation, which we launched, it gets waterfall down. But as the innovation started getting expensive more and more, that waterfall did not happen, it was basically take the old chip, do some minor updates. So we wanted to take all these new like battery life performance uplifts, and you know, having the new AI updates, all of that, but to be able to be affordable, that's what is Wildcat Lake, or Core 300 series. So that's kind of for the budget-conscious buyer, we wanted to make sure we put some new IPs out there, because I don't think anyone is putting that out.
So that's part A. Part B of your question is handheld as a form factor. I think handheld as a form factor is interesting. Different people are trying to do multipurpose use, so would it ever go from companion to main? TBD. But can it expand its use cases from, hey, can I have a handheld, can I have a docked experience? I think long-term, yes. Currently, the software interfaces and a lot of the, let's say, ecosystem around it needs to evolve for it to be meaningful, but there's a lot of experimentation around dock experiences and stuff, which we are working with partners to experiment, but as it stands, I think handheld alone as it's gaming first.
A lot of our partners are experimenting; they're having all those capabilities available. How can you dock, how can you connect keyboard and mouse directly, and then be able to do it, because, like you said, costs are going up. If someone buys this, they want to be maximizing it.
Arrow Lake refresh's positioning
Jake Roach You touched on Wildcat Lake in the mobile segment, and recently we had Arrow Lake refresh, which was a really big readjustment in pricing. In particular, I'm just kind of curious to get more color on that, because when I reviewed those chips, I the expectations, I was briefed on them, and I was like, I know what to expect, but it was a very different Intel than I was used to working with on the desktop run.
Nish Neelalojanan: Short answer would be, we wanted to make sure we are putting out things which gamers would care about and show that we care about gamers, so this was an attempt or step one in getting to that expectation, right? And then obviously same thing with handhelds, making sure we are putting something which the gamers would want, so that's the highest level.
Jake Roach: I mean, again, seeing the results, we've essentially made the original Arrow Lake line outside of a few chips, irrelevant with these two chips. The 270K Plus scales above 285k and 250K can go toe to toe with either the Core Seven or Five.
Nish Neelalojanan: That’s a good thing, right?
Jake Roach: That is a good thing, but it's a good thing for us. It is not a good thing for Intel, right? Like, internally, that undermines your own product. And so I'm curious about the decision there, because at some point you had to have had pushback on, hey, this $300 Core 7 is going to undermine our $600 Core 9 flagship.
Nish Neelalojanan: It was just a decision made with end users in mind, and we want to make sure we are providing value as we come out, and if at all we need to start somewhere, right? And in terms of desktop, that was an effort to let's go with value focus first, and that will help us then gain confidence. From an enthusiast perspective, we needed to build back our reputation. I am sure you would agree with that, and this was, we’re making sure we are providing value to the gamers, and we start with Arrow Lake Refresh, and we have a very strong roadmap to come, so we want to continue.
Jake Roach: It did seem like an appetizer, almost, given you know everything that happened with Arrow Lake, and yeah, I appreciate you wearing that a little bit, because those were again, they were very interesting parts for a number of reasons.
Nish Neelalojanan: Savior [Kim, Intel Director of Client Communications] can correct me if I said something I shouldn't, but that was kind of highest level.
Leaving Hyper-threading behind
Jake Roach: Another question I had; This is more on the mobile side of things, or SoC side of things, is around hyper threading. So I have this question for the Xeon folks that I'm meeting with later today, because there have been comments in the financial reports, comments about returning hyper threading to the data center, whole lot of stuff around that on the consumer side of things. You guys left hyper threading behind with Arrow Lake. I'm wondering now that we have a desktop generation, a mobile generation under your belt. What do you see with that move to get rid of hyper-threading? And is there any consideration for maybe going back to some form of SMT in the future?
Nish Neelalojanan: Highest level, our decisions are always are we getting the right level of performance. The best way to achieve that performance is what we want to go with. Like you said before, with Arrow Lake Refresh, you're not only getting the right game performance at the right price point, but you're also getting almost 2x multi-threaded performance compared to competition, right? So, if you can deliver that without SMT, though the end user, it doesn't matter to the end user. In fact, you're actually getting even better multi-threaded performance because they're actual physical codes versus virtual threads, right? So that's where I would leave it at. We always reevaluate, but it's the best way to give that level of performance in that given price band or that given SKU. So we continue to keep re-evaluating, and different segments may need different things.
Jake Roach: Right now it sounds like it's working out well?
Nish Neelalojanan: Yeah, and like in terms of all the different agentic AI workloads, you need CPU as an orchestrator, having nth number of threads, cleaning up data, lining up a memory, a lot of threads help. So, like I said, when there is utility, and when there is a need, we will constantly evaluate it's, it's rigid to say, oh, it's behind us, or it's rigid to say, oh, we are going to run towards it: If it makes sense, it makes sense, yes. That’s where the data center decision is. They talk more about the growing workload, there is a need.
Jake Roach: It has been interesting. We're coming up at Tom's Hardware on 30 years, and we did a retrospective on CPUs, so I went back to the very first Pentium Two review on Tom's Hardware, and seeing the hyper-threading, and how it was used over decades, it was really fascinating to look at.
Nish Neelalojanan: A lot of the low-power segments, like now, handheld, yes? Those eight E-Cores on that performance cluster are significantly helping with all the low-power gaming, right? So, a lot of these decisions are paying off as it stands. As the workload evolves, as we evolve into different architectures, we will have to evaluate based on at that time what would be the right decision. Okay.
Jake Roach: For years now, Intel Foundry has laid out a really aggressive foundry roadmap. We saw 18A first and now we finally have 18A in data center with Xeon Six Plus. Is that the kind of the cadence we should expect going forward for Intel's cutting-edge hooks to see them debut first on the consumer front?
Nish Neelalojanan: It's the same answer I said before wherever it makes sense first. So we've got especially a lot of our consumer client CPUs, we pick the right process node, which made sense for the right tile, especially now we have multi-chip solution. It gives us the flexibility to pick and choose the right process node for cost, readiness, optimizing for R&D, because sometimes you won't have that IP on a different process, so it's easier to just reuse it, based on availability. Sometimes it's costing some bigger tiles, you can put it on latest and get it to get performance. Some of the tiles where you don't need to push frequency as much, you put it on an older node. And now with all the supply in and around the industry, picking the right process nodes, which is more available, is also going to be important. So we always go through all of these considerations and pick and choose, so there is no settling on client will start data center will follow, vice versa. It's we pick the right process choice based on that architecture, for that side.
Reacting to Nvidia's RTX Spark
Jake Roach: I want to get your reaction to [Nvidia’s RTX Spark]. If you need any better reminder that Twitter is not real life, there's a lot of talk on Twitter that Nvidia entering this market completely decimates and it rules everything. I don't think that's true, but I want to see your reaction to Nvidia getting into that space.
Nish Neelalojanan: I mean, Nvidia puts out great products, and they know how to do gaming. They know how to do all these different things. So we always take everything with a healthy dose of paranoia, but we are also very, very confident with our products, in the sense that X86… Let me put it this way, when we entered this discrete graphics business, our graphics business, it took a painful few years for us to work through all the drivers, all the compatibility issues, and everything ironed out, same thing goes on when an ARM CPU enters a market that's going to be tons of compatibility DRM issues, backward compatibility As a result, we are very confident that we have the right CPU, GPU mix for clients, both for gaming and when it comes to what you call AI inference workloads.
That said, Nvidia is a great partner. We will continue to work with them. You saw some of our announcements. We have some longer-term commitments with them, so both of us have different parts of the roadmap that we will expand together, where there'll be a roadmap where we will be partnering, and where there might be places where we will be competing, but I think it's great for the industry that there is different choices.
Jake Roach: I know, it's a weird situation, especially for Intel, because you guys, you guys do work with Nvidia. Yeah, when I pose similar questions to the other guys, they, they're a little bit more fiery in their responses.
Nish Neelalojanan: Compatibility is going to be a key thing there. x86 on the CPU side is going to have a lot of advantages. We talked about some of the new instruction sets, which got announced by the x86 Consortium, a lot of those lend itself as much to gaming as much as AI, and you'll see a lot of that being talked about more.
A lot of it were agentic AI examples and stuff, because you have to say AI three times before you can talk about anything else, but they also help with gaming significantly, so yeah, it doubles the amount of registers, which you would execute one instruction, so it's based off of AVX, but there’s a few others which came out with it.
The health of the consumer PC market
Jake Roach: Finally I want your reaction more broadly to the PC market right now, because we have all the rising component prices, we have very expensive laptops. On the desktop, it's really, really hard to build a PC right now. I think motherboard sales are down some 30-40% I know you're releasing products to address that market between Wildcat Lake and Arrow Lake pretty refresh, but I kind of want to see your reaction to how that pans out over the next maybe three to five years. Is it a continual area of focus, or is it something that hopefully we're just dealing with over the next few years, where we're really focusing on the budget segment?
Nish Neelalojanan: Large memory is completely overshadowing any CPU prices, right? Memory and storage. The CPU is not anymore determining your system price point, and when you're paying that amount, people will obviously start upgrading. Now, that said, there are still Panther Lake systems you can get below $1,500 out there, right? It's going to be dependent on OEM. It's going to be dependent on markets, and even the Wildcat Lake, they'll announce a $599 starting price point. Yeah, so there are definitely designs which are coming at comparatively reasonable price points, which are available, and longer term, I think something has to give right. The over inflation, we will have to keep an eye, but if I could predict the memory market, I would be rich in stock!
Jake Roach: Let me phrase the question a little bit better, because are you making plans for a longer term, a longer term squeeze on the consumer front, because surely you're going to have to make those plans if you see the headwinds going that way.
Nish Neelalojanan: We do have products with support for DDR4 both on desktop and mobile, so Raptor Lake, you're not end of life in any of them, they're there. We'll continue to make sure that there are products which can take care of older memory technologies if they're available and cheap. Second thing is, we are making sure we are validating lower configs as well. Wildcat Lake starts at 8GB, Wildcat Lake is a single channel product, so there are products which can leverage with low memory and give reasonably good performance, so we are doing everything we can from our perspective to be able to help in any small way. But like I said, when CPU becomes the least relevant from an overall BOM (Bill of Materials) perspective, because it's so expensive. Then we also have CPUs you can buy out into that.
Jake Roach: Speaking of memory, I don't know if you had any involvement with half ranked? Is that what they call them, half ranked DIMMs from ASRock? It was with ASRock and Intel.
Nish Neelalojanan: I am not familiar with that, but we are working with a lot of indigenous memory suppliers to validate them, so we’re doing everything we can in terms of it's not just one, two, or three. If there are some local specific memory vendors, but like in PRC, and now Indonesia is even bringing up a couple of them. We're trying to validate as much as we can, so there's enough choice that people can get pockets of relief. Right? We are looking at UFS for a longer-term horizon, so that every little thing helps, right?
Jake Roach: Absolutely. I appreciate you taking the time and talking over everything. I'm very excited to see the G3 chips in action. I saw them yesterday at the Acer showcase, and I played a little bit of Forza Horizon 6, and these are pretty good.
Nish Neelalojanan: With G3 at least we're putting out some latest and greatest stuff, and in terms of a lot of these, it's not necessarily exclusive. We're broadly available, the 12 Xe on the PC side, and on the handheld, it's not like limited to one OEM. Unlike some people who hold it back, just only give it to one OEM.
Jake Roach: So all these handhelds, I believe all the ones that announced are all Windows-based handhelds. Is there consideration for Linux? How much consideration or weight do you put on that, given things like Steam OS proper?
Nish Neelalojanan: So highest level stuff we announced now is Windows based, but you can take those devices and install… and I'm sure you would imagine we would continuously want to make sure that those experiences are reasonable for end users, and we are, we would talk more about as we get closer to something, but we are exploring beyond Windows, and as we get closer, we'll talk more about.
[Session ends]
