Intel’s Tom Petersen dives deep into the MSI Claw, Meteor Lake, and Arc GPUs

Sure, all the new tech being introduced at CES 2024 in Las Vegas is cool and all… but you know what’s even cooler? Picking the brains of all the smart people who help make that new tech happen. Enter Intel Fellow and graphics guru Tom Petersen.

Handheld gaming PC diehard slash PCWorld video lead Adam Patrick Murray and I caught up with the ever-eloquent Petersen at the show, ostensibly to talk about the MSI Claw. This freshly revealed Steam Deck rival is the first device in its class to run on Intel’s just-as-freshly-revealed “Meteor Lake” Core Ultra processors, and Petersen wanted to chat about the particulars of the device.

But Tom being Tom, he didn’t stop (or start) there. Check out the full interview for insights into:

• Intel’s ferocious pace of driver improvements on desktop Arc graphics cards.
• How that rapid development carries over into the Arc graphics integrated into Meteor Lake mobile chips.
• The benefits of Core Ultra processors moving to a new, disaggregated design chock full of mix-and-match technological “tiles,” like a graphics tile, an I/O tile, a CPU tile, and more.
• Casual non-confirmed speculation about how moving to disaggregated tiles for CPU and GPU designs could enable a future of hyper-specific chips and graphics cards purpose-built for specific needs.
• The MSI Claw and the advantages Core Ultra offers, of course.
• Any information we could pry out of Tom about next-gen Intel Arc “Battlemage” graphics cards.
• And more!

Petersen’s always an insightful interview, and this one’s no exception. For even more details on the MSI’s handheld, check out Adam’s comparison of the Claw against the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally.

If you want to be clued in to all the latest PC tech from the CES 2024 show floor, stay tuned to PCWorld.com and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel! We’ve got lot’s more product reveals and expert videos to come all week long (and beyond).

Author: Brad Chacos, Executive editor