After going in-depth on its Panther Lake series CPUs late last year, Intel is finally ready to start rolling them out. At CES 2026, the company announced 14 SKUs to kick off the Core Ultra Series 3 generation, including three SKUs that have the new X9 or X7 designation to note a larger included GPU with 12 Xe3 cores (read our deep dive on the Xe3 graphics architecture ).
Intel already revealed the top-line specs for the Panther Lake range in October, but now we have a more comprehensive breakdown of all of the options that will be available later this month. Intel says that Panther Lake systems will be available to preorder tomorrow, January 6, with global availability starting on January 27 and continuing throughout the first half of the year.
Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: Intel) (Image credit: Intel) (Image credit: Intel)
If you missed our deep dive on Panther Lake in October, it’s the first range of chips from Intel to use its highly-publicized 18A process. This node brings two innovations that Intel has been talking about for years at this point; gate-all-around (GAA) transistors and a backside power delivery network called PowerVia. The compute tile for Panther Lake chips is built on 18A with a mixture of up to three core types. The compute tile comes with up to four Cougar Cove performance cores, up to eight Darkmont efficiency cores, and up to four low-power Darkmont efficiency cores. Those low-power cores live on what Intel calls a “low-power island,” isolating them from the relatively power-hungry P-cores to improve efficiency on low-lift workloads.
Intel has used this low-power island since it introduced its first disaggregated mobile chips with Meteor Lake, but it wasn’t until Lunar Lake that it brought forth a further “low-power” designation for those cores. Like Lunar Lake, the low-power island in Panther Lake has its own power rail. As we saw in the previous generation, that leads to better battery life, as the chip doesn’t need to tap the main cluster of P-cores and E-cores as often.
Intel hasn’t provided a swath of benchmarks for Panther Lake chips yet, but broadly, it says Panther Lake delivers more than 10% higher single-threaded performance at ISO power, and more than 50% higher multi-threaded performance in the same power envelope compared to Lunar Lake. The massive multi-threaded jump isn’t surprising, however; Lunar Lake topped out with just eight cores, while Panther Lake can scale up to 16.
In addition to the 14 SKUs Intel revealed at CES, it also announced that Panther Lake will eventually make its way all the way to the edge. Intel says it has tested and certified Panther Lake for embedded applications like robotics, automation, and healthcare. Details are sparse about edge implementations of Panther Lake right now, but Intel says embedded systems will begin showing up in the second quarter of 2026.
Intel Core Ultra Series 3 ‘Panther Lake’ specifications
Enough preamble; let’s get to the specs. Intel has 14 SKUs, so the tables below are dense, and there are a few details we’re still waiting on, namely the core split. When looking at core counts, keep in mind that Panther Lake comes with up to four P-cores, eight E-cores, and four low-power E-cores.
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