MSI Claw A8 with AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme gets August launch date in Europe — here's when it may release globally
According to MSI Germany, the MSI Claw A8 is set to launch between August 4 and August 10, as it states it will be released from "week 32" of this year (spotted by VideoCardz). Pre-orders are also available around Europe, with prices at €999 at the German MSI Store.
This comes a month after the MSI Claw A8 launched in China, but there's been no mention of when it will launch in other markets, including the U.S. and the U.K. However, gaming outlet Press Start has reported that the MSI Claw A8 will release in September, with prices starting at $1,749 AUD.
Both European and Australian prices put the MSI Claw A8 at over $1,100 when converted, with many believing the gaming handheld will come in at $999. Along with the upcoming ROG Xbox Ally X tipped to be around the same price, it shows the PC handhelds are going to be quite the pricey venture for all markets.
Interestingly, MSI announced it's releasing an update that fixes the performance drops in "Manual Mode" when adjusting TDP, among other updates. Despite the handheld not being released to global markets yet, it's already getting a big update.
MSI appears to be staggering its launch of its MSI Claw A8 in different markets, as there's currently no word when it will arrive in the U.S. Tariffs could be to blame, but with these releases, it could be inching towards an official release date soon.
With the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X set to launch this fall, likely to be around October or November, MSI will want to beat Microsoft's gaming handheld to the punch, seeing as the Xbox Ally X also comes with an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip.
Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.
Now, with a launch date set in Australia for this September, it's likely the other markets will follow suit — if not a little later in the month. Of course, this is all just speculation, but with the MSI Claw A8 already set to arrive in Germany (and likely the rest of Europe) this August, and the gaming handheld already getting an update, it's looking like it won't be long until we see the MSI Claw A8 arrive in more markets around the globe.
For now, we'll have to sit tight and wait awhile to see when the Ryzen Z2 Extreme-equipped MSI Claw A8 officially launches. It's set to deliver a major boost in PC handheld gaming, sporting an 80Wh battery, up to 24GB of RAM and an 8-inch 1080p 120Hz display.
We were impressed with the upcoming handheld in our hands-on with the MSI Claw A8, so here's hoping it sticks the landing.
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business of Fashion
an hour ago
- Business of Fashion
Unpacking Fashion's New AI Marketing Toolkit
Ever since Mango started to use Smartly, an AI-driven performance marketing tool, for social media ads, its revenue generated by these ads has quadrupled. Using the platform, Mango's design team is able create brand templates that can be easily toggled between different versions of a photo of a dress, for example. Whereas before, creating different images required taking photos of different outfits in multiple settings. The womenswear brand is far from the only fashion player to have figured out how to use artificial intelligence to optimise and boost the efficiency of advertising. Companies including sneaker retailer Foot Locker and German e-commerce giant Zalando are using AI for everything from product image backgrounds to quick-turnaround campaigns that align with social media microtrends. Consumers go through content — and trends — so quickly today that advertisers struggle to keep up with analog creative production alone. AI's rapid generation capabilities help marketers produce more varied ads so viewers are less likely to tire of them as they scroll social media's endless feeds. But figuring out the right formula to use AI is no small feat. New tools seem to pop up weekly and while some platforms excel at automatically generating images, they may lack the editing tools marketers need to ensure visuals stay on-brand. Brands must consider their unique needs — which can range from visualising creative ideas for a campaign and enhancing their product imagery with dynamic backgrounds to automatically targeting different audiences with different versions of the same ad — in order to determine the ways in which AI could amplify their creative production. The most accessible AI tools are ChatGPT and Adobe's Firefly, which many agencies already use for easy image generation. Others favour more advanced platforms like Midjourney and Leonardo AI for greater creative control and experimentation. Meanwhile, AI agency Maison Meta and Zalando aggregate multiple AI technologies into their own platforms, curating the best tools for specific tasks like background generation and editing under one interface — Maison Meta also hosts workshops for clients like Mango to teach them how to use its toolkit. More advanced tools are able to connect the dots between image generation and ad optimisation on social media. Meta, for instance, has its own suite of AI tools called Advantage+, which includes creative enhancements that allow brands to customise their ads by animating imagery, adding music or enhancing copy. Platforms like Smartly and Pixis are also dedicated to optimising the creative content in ads, allowing marketers to create visual templates that can be automatically updated to cater to different customers across platforms like Meta, TikTok, Amazon and more. Footwear retailer JustFab, for example, was able to create a template for its broad product catalog by removing the backgrounds across all images and generating new seasonal scenes across using Smartly. 'It's the consumption happening now through social media that requires a volume that the marketing industry wasn't prepared for,' said PJ Pereira, creative chairman of advertising agency Pereira O'Dell. Lead With Human Creativity Regardless of the AI tools, human creativity and artistic direction must come first. 'This is not the end of the creative director or the creative teams,' said Jason Widup, senior vice president of marketing at AI advertising company Pixis. 'What we're seeing is the creative teams want to create new, interesting, fun concepts. They want to be pushing the envelope. And AI still doesn't have human taste.' What this looks like in practice is using traditional brainpower to come up with core campaign concepts, and then using AI to see how far the idea can be pushed — testing out how an image would look on Mars, for instance, or with a giraffe alongside a model, said Pereira. 'You can think and see in real time,' he said. While in the past, campaign generation could be costly, AI enables marketers to test multiple ideas at one time and see what works best. 'The biggest leap currently as a creative industry is the fact that the risk of trying something is infinitely smaller,' said Pereira. Turn One Asset into Countless Variations Proponents of the technology still don't trust AI to fully take over ad production, said Pixis's Widup. Instead, many feed product assets and brand guidelines into tools like Smartly and Pixis, and then use the platforms to iterate on existing ideas and imagery to change backgrounds, colours or placement to create different versions of an ad that can be personalised and targeted across audiences. For Zalando, using its own AI tools to showcase products in a relevant context — like a hiking boot on a mountain, or even to turn static imagery into video — makes all the difference in driving customer engagement. This, in turn, helps them better understand what their customers want to see, which leads to fewer returns and triple the conversions. 'We do not have endless hands, and we do not have endless time and endless budget,' said Matthias Haase, vice president of content solutions at Zalando. Localise in Real Time Beyond creative content, AI can be leveraged to reach the right users at the right time. Whereas in the analog days of digital acquisition, consumers were repeatedly served the same ads, brands can now automate when viewers are served a piece of content — whether for a complementary product to one they already own or a specific handbag colour they've been searching for. Most of Zalando's AI-generated content is market-specific to cater to local moments like Oktoberfest in Germany or regional running events, for example. These quick-turnaround, targeted campaigns typically take four days to produce, compared to six to eight weeks for traditional ad campaigns, and made up 40 percent of Zalando's campaigns in 2025. Its product description pages will eventually be customised to each geographical market using AI, showing different outfit combinations for French versus Polish shoppers, for example, and swapping out models that are recognised in different regions using digital twins. Build Content that Responds to Context For platforms that connect AI image generation with targeting such as Smartly, brands can reach customers even more dynamically by making each element of an image changeable depending on the customer who is interfacing with it. 'Every element can effectively change based on the time of day, [and the] specific audience that is being targeted,' said Oliver Marlow-Thomas, chief innovation officer at Smartly. 'We can dynamically map specific audiences to show specific variants … The dress the model is wearing, the shoe that's in the image, the colour of the background, or the colour of the hat, all of that is mapped and changeable.' Pixis, on its end, draws on data sources from Shopify to Google to macroeconomic data and weather channels to inform its decisions around which ad imagery is shown to who and when, said Widup. The platform has tested these dynamic ads for fashion brands on Meta, tailoring visuals and messaging to current weather patterns to make them feel relevant — showing rain jackets during storms or breezy outfits during heatwaves, for example — and boosting engagement and conversion rates. Optimise Targeting with Platform Data Brands that advertise on Meta can use its native AI tools to enhance existing content and optimise targeting. After Meta's targeting capabilities were reduced with Apple iOS changes in 2021, the platform began to build out Advantage+ in order to enhance advertising effectiveness on the platform by testing different ad types across users — and the more versions of creative content it has to test on customers, the better. 'Platforms like Meta are now saying, 'We've reduced your targeting capabilities, but just give us a lot of creative ads to use, and we'll refine it,'' said Widup. Meta's own targeting only goes so far, however, because it solely relies on data from its own ecosystem of platforms and first-party customer data provided by advertisers. Tools like Pixis and Smartly, which are integrated across social, search engines and shopping platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Google and Amazon, can use data from various sources to expand their targeting capabilities. Regardless of the optimisation tool used, the creative idea at the root of any campaign — and the creativity that underlies the different AI-made iterations — ultimately remains the most important piece of the puzzle. 'The original thought is the thing that will capture the human,' said Smartly's Marlow-Thomas. 'The artificial thought is the thing that will scale it and create lots of different iterations.'
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
MSI Showcases DC-MHS and MGX Server Platforms for Cloud-Scale and AI Infrastructure at OCP APAC 2025
TAIPEI, Aug. 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- At OCP APAC 2025 (Booth S04), MSI, a global leader in high-performance server solutions, presents modular server platforms for modern data center needs. The lineup includes AMD DC-MHS servers for 21" ORv3 and 19" EIA racks, built for scalable and energy-efficient cloud infrastructure, and a NVIDIA MGX-based GPU server optimized for high-density AI workloads such as LLM training and inference. These platforms demonstrate how MSI is powering what's next in computing with open, modular, and workload-optimized infrastructure. "Open and modular infrastructure is shaping the future of compute. With OCP-aligned and MGX-based platforms, MSI helps customers reduce complexity, accelerate scale-out, and prepare for the demands of cloud-native and AI-driven environments." – Danny Hsu, General Manager of MSI's Enterprise Platform Solutions AMD DC-MHS Platforms for Cloud Infrastructure Powered by a single AMD EPYC™ 9005 processor and up to 12 DDR5 DIMM slots per node, MSI's DC-MHS open compute and core compute platforms deliver strong compute performance and high memory bandwidth to meet the demands of data-intensive and parallel workloads. Built on the modular OCP DC-MHS architecture and equipped with DC-SCM2 management modules, these systems offer cross-vendor interoperability, streamlined integration, and easier serviceability, ideal for modern, scalable infrastructure in hyperscale and cloud environments. The CD281-S4051-X2 targets 21" ORv3 rack deployments with 48Vdc power, featuring a 2OU 2-node design and EVAC cooling that supports up to 500W TDP per node. With 12 E3.S PCIe 5.0 NVMe bays per node, it offers high-density, front-access storage for throughput-heavy applications. The CD270-S4051-X4 fits into a standard 2U 4-node 19" EIA chassis, maximizing compute density for environments with limited rack space. Supporting up to 400W air-cooled or 500W liquid-cooled CPUs, and equipped with front-access U.2 NVMe bays, it's built for flexible deployment across general-purpose and scale-out workloads. NVIDIA MGX AI Server for Scalable AI Workloads Built on the NVIDIA MGX modular architecture, the CG480-S5063 is optimized for large-scale AI workloads with a 2:8:5 CPU:GPU:NIC topology. It supports dual Intel® Xeon® 6 processors and up to eight 600W FHFL dual-width GPUs, including NVIDIA H200 NVL and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition. With 32 DDR5 DIMMs and 20 PCIe 5.0 E1.S bays, it delivers high compute density, fast storage, and modular scalability for next-gen AI infrastructure. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE MSI Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Gizmodo
9 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Intel, Not AMD, Could Be the Secret to Kickass Next-Gen Handheld PCs
Intel is an empire past its prime and is beset on all sides. Just as Paul 'Muad'Dib' Atreides of Dune monologued on the many futures he perceived, there is 'a narrow way through' for the beleaguered chipmaker. The way forward could be with a newfound gaming focus on its next-gen chips. Its desktop CPUs may be getting a gamer-centric upgrade, but the real surprise may be how it could win out in a market it has yet to truly compete in: handheld gaming. Handheld gaming PCs need Intel to shake things up. It's a thought I couldn't shake loose as soon as I saw leaked benchmark figures for the upcoming MSI Claw A8. The handheld is a sequel to the less-than-stellar MSI Claw 7 and the chunky, though incredibly powerful, MSI Claw 8 AI+. Compared to the last two Intel-based handhelds, the A8 is running on the upcoming AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme. That chip is an APU, aka an accelerated processing unit, which is a CPU that contains graphics processing capabilities. AMD first announced its flagship chip for handhelds in January this year. We have yet to get our hands on any device showcasing the chip's capabilities in the many months since then. AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme@17W (MSI Claw A8)vsIntel Core Ultra 7 258V@17W (MSI Claw 8 AI+) — HXL (@9550pro) August 3, 2025 Leaked benchmarks stemming from Chinese-language social media may explain why we haven't seen too much about AMD's latest chip. The Claw 8 AI+ used an Intel Core Ultra 258V processor made for lightweight PCs, which meant it supported Intel's ARC 140V graphics capabilities. These benchmarks show the Intel and AMD chips are nearly on par with each other in games like Far Cry 6 and Hitman 3. The Ryzen Z2 Extreme gets around five more frames per second in titles like Assassin's Creed Shadows and Monster Hunter Wilds. Sure, AMD's chip seems better than Intel's at this wattage, but it's not that much better considering the 258V wasn't explicitly built with this form factor in mind. More leaked benchmarks from the MSI Claw A8 don't give AMD much more of a soapbox to tout its capabilities. YouTuber ETA Prime showcased how the Ryzen Z2 Extreme compares to the last-gen Z1 Extreme from close to two years ago. The Z2 is running on the chipmaker's latest Zen 5 chip microarchitecture and ostensibly has more cores on the updated RDNA 3.5 GPU cores to output better graphics capabilities. While it does much better in synthetic benchmarks than the previous gen, in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the Z2 Extreme only showed an average of four or five frames per second higher than the Z1 Extreme. If you already have a handheld with the older flagship, it will be hard to justify dropping even more money on an updated device. Rumors suggest the high-end handhelds of today could be very costly. AMD's latest may be disappointing to some, but Intel may actually have a chance of beating its major competitor at its own game. For one, Intel's general manager of client AI and technical marketing—Robert Hallock—previously confirmed with Laptop Mag (RIP) that Intel plans to make handheld-centric chips. Those Intel chips mentioned before, which are part of the Lunar Lake family of CPUs, could become even more graphically capable with the next generation (codenamed Panther Lake). Leaks of a shipping manifest posted last week by leaker X86deadandback (via PCGamer) indicate the next generation of Intel's mobile chips will have 50% more of its graphics cores. The latest rumors suggest Intel will also upgrade its graphics cores from Xe2 to Xe3. We don't know what that means for practicality's sake. More cores with better rendering capabilities don't speak to the chip's architecture. If it can combine better graphics capabilities with better AI upscaling capabilities than the current XeSS 2, Intel's next mobile chips could be a far larger boon for handhelds than AMD. The only question remaining is whether we'll see a handheld with an 'Intel Inside' sticker beaming like a happy child on the side of the device. We know the Lenovo Legion Go 2, alongside the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, will house the Z2 Extreme. The other lingering issue is that Valve's SteamOS, which is—for the time being—a better option for handhelds than Windows, only supports AMD's Ryzen Z series of APUs, not Intel. There are many mountains to climb before 'Team Blue' can make a statement, and it better make one soon before AMD can catch up.
