You already know everything you need to about what’s happening inside Intel’s latest laptop chips. Intel Core Ultra Series 3, aka Panther Lake, promises to offer strong performance plus a solid battery life. Now, we finally know which chips are going in which laptops, and I can already tell you you want one with the higher-end graphics capabilities.
There are a heap of different chips for various price points. The top-end Panther Lake chip is the Intel Core Ultra 388H, a 16-core CPU with a max performance core frequency of 5.1GHz. This chip will indeed sport the new Intel Arc B390 graphics with 12 of Intel’s newfangled Xe3 GPU cores. Just a reminder, Panther Lake will support Wi-Fi 7 standard but not Thunderbolt 5. There will be laptops with these chips available for preorder starting Jan. 6, so pay attention to Gizmodo’s CES coverage for all the specifics on that front.
In either case, Intel promises Core Ultra Series 3 will offer 60% better CPU performance over the previous-gen Lunar Lake chips. Intel also claimed laptops with these chips could get seven hours of battery life using UL Procyon Battery Life benchmarks and nine hours in a Microsoft Teams chat.
The other big upgrade this time around is the GPU capabilities. The chips are using a die-to-die bridge, allowing the chipmaker to scale up the graphics processor. The highest-end Intel chips will receive 12 Xe3 GPU cores. Sure, that means it will offer stronger gaming performance compared to a last-gen AMD chip, but Intel went as far as to claim it could manage over 50 fps in Battlefield 6 with “Overkill” graphics settings. That’s only with the help of a revised XeSS upscaler. The updated XeSS 3 also has multi-frame generation capabilities, if you really don’t mind the thought of playing games with so-called “fake frames.”
Intel is betting its latest chips are going to offer the secret sauce for mobile gaming. Now it’s hoping to dethrone AMD on handheld PCs. Just as the company previously promised last year, Intel promised we’ll see some new pint-sized gaming devices sporting Panther Lake sometime later this year.
Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.
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