is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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As we predicted, the world’s biggest consumer electronics show was a bit of a bust for gamers this year! CES 2026 brought us several neat gamepads, but barely any handhelds and no new desktop GPUs — not from Nvidia, not from Intel, and not from AMD.
But if you dig deep, AMD said two things at this year’s show that are worthy of attention. Did you catch that the company’s about to make socketed mobile chips again? Or that its answer to Intel is to lower the price of its monster Strix Halo silicon?
Publicly, AMD barely acknowledged consumers at the Consumer Electronics Show. “AMD failed us,” decried Gamers Nexus, pointing out that the company’s keynote was almost entirely fixated on AI. Outside the keynote, the company’s few consumer-friendly announcements — including the Ryzen 7 9850X3D for gaming desktops and Ryzen AI 400 for laptops — are all retreads of existing components.
AMD also didn’t announce a new chip for handheld gaming PCs, no successor to the Z2 and Z2 Extreme it introduced a year ago, even as Intel publicly announced plans for an “entire handheld gaming platform” and Qualcomm teased its own handhelds for a possible March reveal.
Intel didn’t miss a chance to jab: “They’re selling ancient silicon, while we’re selling up-to-date processors specifically designed for this market,” Intel client product management director Nish Neelalojanan told PCWorld.
Yet AMD claims those so-called “ancient” processors are more than a match for Intel’s new Panther Lake silicon. AMD client chip boss Rahul Tikoo told Tom’s Hardware that AMD’s Strix Halo / Ryzen AI Max chip “will kill” Panther Lake. He said, “It’s not even a fair fight at that point, because it’s discrete-level graphics.”
Tikoo also told Tom’s Hardware that Intel’s gaming-grade Panther Lake chips might be pricier than you expect: “And, oh, by the way, that 12 Xe [Panther Lake]... Wait until you see the price point on that. It’s gonna be, you know. Enough said.”
Price has been the problem with AMD’s Strix Halo too — every powerful Ryzen handheld, mini desktop, and monster tablet we’ve seen has cost around $2,000, even before the RAM crunch. But that brings me to the first exciting thing for gamers AMD quietly revealed at CES: The cost of its powerful Strix Halo systems is almost certainly about to come down.
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