MSI’s New Claw A8 is Powered by AMD

MSI has announced a new Claw handheld that is powered by an AMD chipset. This marks the third handheld from the brand in recent years but the first model to ditch Intel in favour of AMD.

The MSI Claw A8 comes with an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip and 24GB of DDR5 RAM according to MSI. This is slightly lower than the 32GB of RAM in the previous MSI Claw AI Plus, which launched on the market last year.

Much of the unit remains the same. It still comes with an 8-inch fully HD 120Hz display, 1TB SSD storage, but comes in two colours, including white and lime green.

MSI is also relaunching its Claw 8 AI+ in a new “Polar Tempest Edition” model that features a white external shell and the same Intel Lunar Lake chip. So this special edition doesn’t come with the AMD Ryzen Extreme Z2.

MSI has had a rough time with its handhelds in the past. The company launched the original Claw back in 2024, and it was poorly received due to its steep price tag and poor performance. It was then followed up by the Claw AI Plus, which seemed to redeem the handheld thanks to its improved performance, but MSI still struggled to move units.

This new MSI Claw A8 will hopefully fix the reputation the handheld has on the market. With the ASUS ROG Ally 2 and Nintendo Switch 2 pegged to launch at the same time, it is going to be difficult to drive all these new handhelds.

We don’t know what the release date is for the MSI Claw A8. The company has yet to reveal the price too. Given the “mysterious” marketing of the previous model, which seemingly released without any announcement (I don’t even know if you can buy it in South Africa, to be honest), we’ll have to just wait for it to appear in-store.

You can check out all the specs for the new handhelds below;