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.
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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.
Image: Intel
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.
Image: Intel
“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.
Unfortunately, Intel doesn’t properly label its axes with measurements, so you’ll have to guess how much power we’re talking. Image: Intel
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