- The rumor suggests that we could get an MSI Claw Ryzen Z2 announcement
- The MSI Claw 8 AI+ ships to customers this month
- It is unclear whether it can be with a Ryzen Z2 Extreme or Z2 processor
CES 2025 has seen plenty of announcements for desktop, laptop and handheld PC hardware, and a new rumor suggests that MSI could join the party, potentially announcing a new Claw handheld gaming PC powered by AMD’s Ryzen Z2 APU.
This comes from CodeCommando (a reliable source of AMD and MSI leaks) on X, which claims that new MSI Claw models offering a choice between Intel’s Lunar Lake and the new AMD Ryzen Z2 processor will be announced. However, there is no information on whether this reveal will happen during CES 2025 (which is now drawing to a close) or later down the line.
The MSI Claw 8 AI+ was announced last December and is expected to ship to customers this month. Based on these new rumors, there’s a small chance we’ll see an announcement or teaser for a Ryzen Z2 version later this year.
How would a Ryzen Z2 version of the MSI Claw fare against competitors?
While there has been no suggestion that MSI’s rival Asus could launch a ROG Ally X successor, Lenovo has already announced the Legion Go S and Legion Go 2 (which is still a prototype), with the latter using the Ryzen Z2 Extreme.
Again, I must emphasize that this is still a rumor, but if MSI is indeed planning to announce a new MSI Claw so soon after the launch of the Claw 8 AI+, I would imagine it would use the Z2 Extreme rather than the Z2 chip , if only to keep up with the competition.
If so, it would be able to go toe-to-toe performance-wise with the likes of the Legion Go 2 and other Z2 Extreme-based handhelds. That’s not to say that the current Lunar Lake processors found in the MSI Claw 7 and 8 aren’t powerful enough, but AMD’s chip could run better with the benefit of the FSR upscaling method, which has evolved further than Intel’s newer XeSS, which does a similar job.
Either way, we’re still probably a long way from seeing any new major entry into MSI’s gaming handheld lineup, at least for now. But as more of MSI’s competitors bring out increasingly powerful handheld gaming PCs, it won’t wait too long before it also releases a new, more powerful version of the Claw.
