Intel Panther Lake Laptop CPU Review: Call it a comeback

It was Intel He talks the talk For several months About her New generation of laptop chipsThe first thing he made Which is long awaited Process 18a. 18A aims to steer Intel back into the blue waters by improving its chips and, if possible, attracting chip designers like Qualcomm and… Nvidia To use Intel’s foundries, not just its competitor TSMC. Last year’s Arrow Lake chips received an A Mixed receptionespecially Desktop versions. On the other hand, the mobile-only Lunar Lake chips were impressive, showing that the x86 architecture still has a lot of fight against the slowly rising tide of Windows laptops. but Moon Lake It was a unique experience designed more than manufactured by Intel. Relying on TSMC silicon To do the heaviest lifting. Panther Lake puts homegrown Intel back inland.

I tested the flagship Intel Core Ultra X9 388H Panther Lake chipset in 2026 Asus ZenBook Duo Dual screen laptop, and it was fun. It’s fast enough for intense work and multitasking, powerful enough for 1080p gaming at high settings, and lasts an entire workday using productivity apps on battery power. With Panther Lake, Intel is on a roll.

Panther Lake CPUs come in 8- and 16-core versions, consisting of Cougar Cove performance cores (P core) and Darkmont efficiency cores (E core). The Core Ultra Intel promoted it as More efficient than Lunar Lake While at the same time being more powerful than the Arrow Lake chips typically found in high-powered workstations and desktop replacement laptops.

Against its closest rival, Panther Lake is not an outright winner. Apple’s M5 and AMD’s Strix Halo dominate most of the benchmark scores in our table below. But Intel’s 388H Panther Lake chip easily outperforms AMD’s high-end Strix Point chip in all but one of our tests. That’s a big jump from Intel, considering the Strix Point He won easily Lunar Lake just one year ago. Now, Panther Lake also beats the examples of both Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake-H.

While Apple is still the speed champion in most of these categories, I was pleasantly surprised to see Panther Lake slightly outperform the MacBook Pro at exporting 4K video in Adobe Premiere Pro. These are those 12 graphics cores in action.

In real-world use, Panther Lake’s speed is evident. When I fired up my Adobe Lightroom Classic catalog and started editing some 50-megapixel RAW files, it felt as fast—or nearly as fast—as a MacBook Pro. I can make rigorous changes in the development module, and navigate between images, without everything crashing as it often does on other Windows laptops. Even revealing the topic and removing the healing brush was fast.

And I edited photos on battery power. Unlike most Windows laptops I’ve used so far, the Zenbook Duo is just as fast on battery power when plugged into the wall. This is often something Windows laptop makers limit in their hardware designs, but I’m relieved that’s not the case with Panther Lake on the Zenbook Duo. It’s a big win for editing and content creation on Windows, because it allows the platform to match one of the major strengths of modern MacBooks. I only wish all Windows laptop manufacturers would follow suit.

Speaking of battery power, the Zenbook Duo’s Panther Lake is the champ. Especially when you consider its power two Bright, high-resolution OLED displays. You can read deeper into my real-life experience with Zenbook Duo battery life My full review of the laptopbut here are some quick results: It lasted over 14 hours in our rundown test, and I can easily last a nine-hour workday of dual-screen multitasking with enough juice left for some light casual use in the evening.

As for gaming, Intel claims Panther Lake’s 12 Xe graphics cores are on par with Nvidia’s discrete RTX 4050 laptop GPU, much like how the Strix Halo goes toe-to-toe with the RTX 4060. Digital FoundryEarly testing of Panther Lake at CES found this to be the case Nibbling on the heels of the RTX 3050 desktop The card has a resolution of 1080p.

I only did a few written game benchmarks, because I wanted to spend more time actually playing them. But one criterion that stood out to me was Cyberpunk 2077which averaged 40 fps at 1920 x 1200 resolution at Ultra settings. This is without ray tracing, but also without any XeSS (Intel’s version of super-resolution upscaling). Panther Lake is no slouch, even if AMD’s thick Strix Halo chip still has the advantage in graphics.

Once I dived into playing titles like Cyberpunk, Hell Divers 2, Battlefield 6and a few others, I found that Panther Lake could typically hit 60fps or just below at 1920 x 1200 resolution at high settings with XeSS Balanced enabled. You can improve graphics quality further by turning on ray tracing or flipping XeSS from Balanced to Quality, but I would only do that if you’re comfortable playing at closer to 30fps. I prefer 60fps as a baseline.

Setting the game’s graphics to reach a baseline of 40 to 60 frames per second means you can play the new XeSS multi-frame generationwhich can make games look extremely smooth at much higher than 120fps. You can control the creation of multiple frames in the Intel application, choosing between creating 2x, 3x, and 4x frames. It felt soft enough to use in it Battlefield 6 And it came close to refreshing the original Zenbook Duo at 144Hz (although I turned it off in multiplayer mode to ensure there was no chance of increased input latency). Nvidia may be moving towards… Create 6x multiple frames with DLSS 4.5but Intel does well at its slower pace — and is still ahead AMD Redstonewhich does not support multi-frame generation.

As excited as I’m for Panther Lake to finally arrive, and hold its ground well, I’m now looking forward to further testing of slightly lower-end versions — ones found in more moderately priced laptops than this $2,300 dual-screen monitor with a massive battery. (His hand(Maybe?) And I’m equally excited to see who the new contenders are AMD and Qualcomm Stack, including those Cheaper gaming-focused Strix Halo variants. It’s an exciting time for new laptop releases (rising prices, of course).

There’s a lot of competition coming, but Panther Lake is the first out of the gate looking like the Windows laptop chip to beat. Welcome back to the show, Intel.