MSI seems to have immediately redeemed their Claw handheld, by being first to jump into the new generation of AI powered Windows chipsets.
As reported by Digital Trends, the OEM has just unveiled the MSI Claw 8 AI +, at this year’s Computex tech event in Taiwan. The key change in this new generation handheld is the shift up to Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake chipsets, which we’ll get back to later.
MSI has also promised several other improvements to the previous device, which was rightly lambasted for failing to live up to its promises of matching competitors running on AMD Z1 Extreme chipsets. First, the screen is growing from 7 to 8 inches, while it will still be VRR, 1080p at 120 Hz.
The MSI Claw 8 AI + will also come with 32GB of LPDDR5x at 8.5 Gbps speeds, as well as a 1TB M.2 2280 SSD. It also jumps up to an 80 hour battery, matching the same capacity that is found in its competitor, the ASUS ROG Ally. Finally, there have been improvements to its casing and triggers, which hopefully will be so good that new users will just take for granted that the Claw will be comfortable to hold for long periods of time.
Now, because Intel still isn’t ready to fully unveil their Lunar Lake chipsets, MSI also wasn’t allowed to share more information on the chipset that will be found in the MSI Claw 8 AI +. The preview that Intel did give to the press is enough reason to be truly excited.
While Qualcomm jumped the gun ahead of Intel and AMD with their Snapdragon + Elite chipsets running Windows on ARM, Intel was making something that’s arguably more ambitious. Their Lunar Lake chipsets will run Windows on x86 as efficiently as Qualcomm has promised that it can run Windows on ARM. So, a future of Windows computers that can run on batteries, like the phone you could be reading this article in right now.
We won’t go too deep into the technical details here. Intel revealed Lunar Lake would be a complete SOC, designed to optimize efficiency over everything else. They have added power to Lunar Lake’s efficiency cores, given the chipset more tools to prioritize efficiency, and also decide how to stay efficient. Intel has even gone as far as to give up hyper threading.
Lunar Lake will also come bundled with 2nd generation Xe2, or as you may know it, Battlemage. That’s the same technology that’s already in their full sized GPUs.
We don’t know if the MSI Claw 8 AI + will turn out to be a dud, or if it will immediately jump over every other competitor in the handheld gaming space. That’s the scale of ambition that Lunar Lake promises. It’s certainly the last thing we expected out of the tech industry’s AI push, which seemed to be as frivolous as what we’ve heard said about crypto, the cloud, mixed reality, IoT, etc etc etc.
But you can see more than enough tech journalists attesting that the promised next computing revolution is real. Rise or fall, MSI has placed themselves in the frontline of that revolution, in the handheld gaming front.
