Intel has released its Core Ultra Series 3 processors for laptops, known internally as Panther Lake, with support from numerous PC manufacturers.
During the CES 2026 unveiling, Jim Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Client Computing Group, remarked that the company has been influencing the essentials of basic computing.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan expressed pride in announcing the delivery of the initial Intel 18A processors, which serve as the foundation for Panther Lake. This manufacturing process incorporates RibbonFET gate-all-around technology to optimize current flow and energy use, alongside PowerVia for rear-side power distribution, resulting in a 15 percent improvement in performance efficiency per watt.
The company first presented details on Panther Lake back in October, revealing the processor design and examples of its applications.
These Core Ultra Series 3 processors revive the combination of performance cores (P-cores), efficiency cores (E-cores), and low-power efficiency cores (LP E-cores) seen in the Core Ultra 100 series, or Meteor Lake. They integrate an NPU delivering 50 TOPS in AI computations and Intel's Xe3 graphics unit, enhancing 3D rendering capabilities.
According to Intel's October disclosure, Panther Lake achieves 10 percent superior single-threaded performance compared to Lunar Lake while consuming the same amount of power. It also provides over 50 percent greater multithreaded performance relative to both Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, with overall power usage reduced by 10 percent from Lunar Lake.
Company officials have described Panther Lake informally as combining the processing speed of Arrow Lake—an architecture that underperformed in desktops but excelled in mobile versions—with the energy efficiency of Lunar Lake.
Panther Lake features three distinct arrangements of its P-cores, E-cores, and LP-cores.
Johnson noted at CES 2026 that Panther Lake offers roughly 60 percent higher performance than the Core Ultra 200 series, or Lunar Lake, based on the Cinebench 2024 multicore test. In various benchmarks, Intel reduced power consumption by approximately 2.8 times.
Similar to AMD's Ryzen AI Max, referred to as Strix Halo, and the Ryzen 9000X3D series, which employ extensive cache memory to boost speed, the top-tier '12Xe' variant will headline premium laptop models. Intel's Dan Rogers, vice president overseeing PC products, identified the graphics component as the Intel Arc B390. He indicated that gaming capabilities will exceed Lunar Lake by an average of 73 percent.
Rogers added that the B390 graphics can leverage frame generation techniques to elevate frame rates. With XeSS3, it generates three AI-assisted frames for each one produced by the GPU.
Intel views Panther Lake highly enough to develop a dedicated handheld gaming platform using this technology, set for release later this year, aiming to compete with AMD's dominance in that market, according to Rogers.
Intel's collaborators are preparing more than 200 designs featuring Core Ultra Series 3, as stated by Johnson.
Johnson emphasized that the Series 3 lineup includes options suitable for all users.