is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Panther Lake is the most important chip Intel has made in years. It’s the one that will tell the world if a smaller, more focused Intel can still meet or beat the competition from Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm. It’s the first on Intel’s 18A process, the one Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger claimed would right the ship and make Intel a manufacturing leader before he was unceremoniously shown the door last December.
That’s a lot riding on one piece of silicon when it arrives in late 2025 and early 2026! But what is Panther Lake, aka “Intel Core Ultra Series 3,” actually going to bring to a laptop or handheld near you?
More battery life, more performance, more gaming graphics, more affordably. That’s the idea, anyhow. Oh, and Panther Lake isn’t just for thin-and-light machines. This time, Intel has built three different flavors of this chip, so it can replace both the lighter-weight Lunar Lake and the heftier Arrow Lake-H you find in more powerful laptops right now.
Intel will sell 8- and 16-core CPUs, each with four brand-new Xe3 graphics cores, as well as a 16-core CPU with 12 Xe3 graphics cores and 12 ray-tracing units — the most integrated graphics horsepower it’s shipped to date, and a preview of what might come if Intel continues to ship desktop gaming GPUs.
“With the last generation we gave you a dilemma,” says Intel chief CPU architect Stephen Robinson. “You could buy a Lunar Lake and get fantastic battery life… or you could buy Arrow Lake that had more throughput.” Now, Intel is trying to solve that dilemma, he tells me.
Although Panther Lake abandons the onboard memory that helped make last year’s Lunar Lake so efficient, and adds the low-power E-cores that were holding Meteor Lake’s battery life back, Intel claims you’ll actually see up to 10 percent lower power than Lunar Lake across the entire chip. And, Robinson tells me, that should genuinely mean better battery life than Lunar Lake in real-world use cases, including Microsoft Teams.
Diving into theoretical workloads, the chips sound even more impressive: Intel’s brand-new Cougar Cove performance cores (P-cores) and Darkmont efficiency cores (E-cores), on the 18A process, let Intel claim 40 percent lower power at “similar” single-threaded performance, or 50 percent more multi-threaded performance at “similar” power, seemingly leaving Lunar Lake in the dust. Meanwhile, Intel’s new graphics claim to offer over 50 percent more GPU power than their predecessors, too.
But it’ll depend on which of Intel’s three new kinds of chip you’re buying, of course. While the top-flight Panther Lake with 12 Xe3 GPU cores might offer 50 percent more GPU power than the Lunar Lake chip with 8 Xe2 GPU cores, it isn’t yet clear to me how the new chips with just 4 Xe3 GPU cores might compare, or whether one might have a battery life advantage over another.
That said, even the 12 Xe3 core variant shouldn’t be too beefy to fit into a handheld like the MSI Claw 8 that surprised me last month — Intel fellow Tom Petersen suggested as much onstage during Intel’s architecture event. And when it does, it should have more stable performance because of a new “Intelligent Bias Control v3,” too, which sends “hints” to Windows to offload gaming tasks to E-cores instead of P-cores, so the system can divert that extra power to graphics where the games really need it.
“We’re more heavily relying on our E-cores for gaming because they’re beefy E-cores and that frees up more power for the GPU,” Robinson tells me.
Petersen also revealed that Intel, like Microsoft and Valve, is now precompiling game shaders, storing them in the cloud, and letting you automatically download them to your device for less stutter during gameplay. It’s a part of the Intel Graphics Software package, will be updated as games and drivers change, and he said you can turn it off if you like.
The new Panther Lake chips will also contain a new NPU for AI tasks that’s just slightly more powerful than its predecessor (but takes up less space and cost), support for up to 96GB of LPDDR5 memory or 128GB of DDR5 as well as compression-mounted modular LPCAMM memory — I’m asking which laptop makers might take Intel up on that last — and an updated image processing unit that adds new AI-based noise reduction and local tone mapping for your webcam and beyond. The media engine now also offers 10-bit AVC and AV1 encode and decode for video, and several Sony XAVC codecs.
Today isn’t the day we’ll learn which exact Panther Lake chips are coming to market, or their various performance nuances, or what they’ll be officially called.
But you can take a peek at the differences between the primary 8-core, 16-core, and 16-core/16 Xe-core in the images below. You’ll notice that the lowest-end parts won’t have three kinds of CPU cores, only two; the highest-end parts support the fastest memory; you give up eight PCIe lanes when you add the eight extra Xe3 cores; and Intel hasn’t yet integrated Thunderbolt 5 onto the controller, only Thunderbolt 4. (You can get Thunderbolt 5, it’s just not guaranteed.)
You may also notice that, yet again, these chips aren’t entirely being built on Intel’s own manufacturing processes. Only the compute tile is built on Intel 18A, while the platform controller tile is always produced externally, and the 12-core version of Intel’s Xe3 GPU is produced externally as well.
That’s not a criticism of Intel — it’s just interesting to think about what else could fit into those empty gold regions of Intel’s CPU packages, as we head toward a future where Nvidia graphics might soon appear there, too.
Intel previously promised Panther Lake would ship its first SKU later this year, with additional parts in the first half of 2026. The company doesn’t have a more specific window than that right now, but it writes that Panther Lake is “already in production, on track to meet customer commitments, and poised to become the industry’s most widely adopted PC platform,” and that its Arizona Fab 52 is “fully operational and set to reach high-volume production using Intel 18A later this year.”
