Intel’s Core Ultra lineup of desktop and laptop processors has been frustrating to review. None of them has been across-the-board awful or totally without redeeming qualities. But Intel has struggled mightily this decade to produce new processors that are straightforward, easy-to-recommend improvements over their predecessors.
The company’s 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips offered big boosts to CPU performance over the 11th-generation CPUs, for example, but they also usually came with a significant hit to battery life, and they only minimally improved the GPU. The first-generation Core Ultra chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, improved the GPU but couldn’t beat the CPU performance of older chips. Last year’s Core Ultra 200V series, codenamed Lunar Lake, boasted good battery life and solid graphics performance but weaker CPU performance; better-performing Core Ultra 200H chips (codenamed Arrow Lake) improved CPU performance but came with lesser GPUs and some other missing features.
The Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake, finally put an end to the years of uneven zig-zagging advancement we’ve seen in the last half-decade.
Intel provided us with its best Panther Lake chip for testing—a Core Ultra X9 388H, ensconced in the odd-but-compelling Asus Zenbook Duo UX8407. And at least in this form, Panther Lake is mostly excellent, with CPU and graphics performance that easily outstrips the last few generations of Intel chips and is more than competitive with AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 and 400 processors. Power efficiency and battery life are also excellent, at least based on our sample size of one laptop.
In the long term, Intel needs Panther Lake to become the new normal rather than an aberration—a foundation for steady, predictable iteration instead of a one-off. Given Intel’s struggles over the last decade, I’ll believe that’s happening when I see it.