Intel doesn’t suck anymore. It’s redemption time
I’ve reviewed lots of laptops powered by Intel CPUs over the last year, and I’ve had gripes. The Core Ultra Series 2 generation was a branding mess with its mix of Lunar Lake , Arrow Lake , and Meteor Lake architectures. But at CES 2026, Intel turned a corner. Intel Core Ultra Series 3—codenamed Panther Lake—looks like it’s actually a coherent platform to go toe-to-toe with AMD and Qualcomm. Intel seems to have its swagger back, too. Intel had TSMC manufacture its Lunar Lake CPUs last generation, but Intel is now back to manufacturing its own CPUs again. This year, Intel struck a huge deal with Nvidia and the US government became a large shareholder in its operations . Despite recent struggles, the big chipmaker shouldn’t be written off yet. I didn’t have the opportunity to benchmark any of these new Panther Lake-powered machines at CES, so stay tuned for that once we get our hands on review units. But I’m still impressed—and here’s why. Battery life and performance in one Intel’s Lunar Lake was a strange beast. Made by TSMC instead of Intel, it was Intel’s attempt to jump on board the power-efficient laptop revolution, complete with onboard memory that couldn’t be upgraded, a speedy NPU for running overhyped Copilot+ PC AI features, and a surprisingly capable integrated GPU . Mark Hachman / Foundry But Lunar Lake’s big limitation was multithreaded performance. It came far behind Arrow Lake and even Meteor Lake CPUs in our Cinebench and Handbrake benchmarks. That’s why most laptops I reviewed throughout the year eventually went with Arrow Lake or Meteor Lake chips. Yet, while those offered stronger performance, they sacrificed battery life and also ran hotter than Lunar Lake. With Panther Lake, Intel says we should expect more than 50 percent better multithreaded performance over Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, with 10 percent less power usage than Lunar Lake. Intel also claims that Panther Lake’s performance is similar to Arrow Lake. This time around, it sounds like we’re getting both battery life and solid multithreaded CPU performance in the same hardware package. (Want to dive deeper? Learn more about Panther Lake’s technical details .) New integrated GPUs look impressive Intel has been hard at work on upgrading its integrated graphics over the last few years, and it’s now marketing its new Arc B390 iGPU as being on par with Nvidia’s RTX 4000-series discrete graphics cards. We benchmarked the hardware at CES 2026 … and it’s close! With Lunar Lake, Intel delivered seriously impressive integrated Arc graphics—but Lunar Lake wasn’t the place for serious iGPU upgrades. Lunar Lake was focused on battery life and not CPU performance, which meant Intel’s best-performing integrated graphics was paired with a CPU platform that struggled in multithreaded performance. Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake had even worse iGPUs. Benchmarking Intel’s Panther Lake with Cyberpunk 2077 . Mark Hachman / Foundry By bringing Intel’s fastest iGPUs together with an even faster CPU, Panther Lake promises to power laptops with impressive gaming performance on integrated graphics. That’s something a few PC manufacturers were eager to tell me about at CES 2026. Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 hardware could power PC gaming experiences without a discrete GPU. Companies like HP were showing off demos of PC games running on Intel’s new iGPUs. Competing with AMD in handhelds With Panther Lake, Intel is talking about bringing more competition to the gaming handheld space. Steam Deck-style handheld gaming PCs largely use AMD processors, and there’s speculation that companies like Valve may release hardware with Arm chips in the future. Intel had so much swagger that one executive even talked smack at CES 2026, accusing AMD of “selling ancient silicon” for handhelds. Intel is promising custom Panther Lake hardware for the gaming handheld market—something that could be seriously impressive, considering how good Intel’s integrated graphics are getting. AMD disagreed (naturally), saying Panther Lake would come with a bunch of baggage and be a bad fit for handhelds. We’ll see who’s right after the hardware is released. I’m just excited to see more competition. NPUs that catch up to Windows 11’s minimum specs While lots of PC manufacturers are still eager to talk about Copilot+ PCs and AI laptops, Microsoft looks like it’s moving on from its NPU obsession. Companies like Dell are shifting away from AI laptops , too. The NPUs Intel has been shipping for the last few years have been far below Microsoft’s minimum specs. After Microsoft announced back in May 2024 that Copilot+ PCs would require an NPU with at least 40 TOPS of performance, Intel has mostly been shipping laptop hardware with 13 TOPS NPUs—far short of Microsoft’s minimum target. Only Lunar Lake and now Panther Lake cleared the floor for Copilot+ PC features. Meanwhile, all Qualcomm Snapdragon X hardware met the minimum, and AMD’s Ryzen AI CPUs delivered solid performance on a traditional x86 platform with the NPU specs Microsoft asked for. Matthew Smith / Foundry It’s been a big black eye for Intel that most Intel CPU-powered laptops still don’t meet Microsoft’s minimums for these hyped AI features, over 18 months after Microsoft’s announcement. The good news? Most PC buyers don’t care much about Copilot+ PC features, and Microsoft now appears to be deemphasizing them. But at least Intel has finally caught up to Microsoft’s minimum specs. Renewed focus on manufacturing process Intel’s choice to outsource Lunar Lake manufacturing to TSMC was a huge shift in its priorities. Up until then, the company had always manufactured its CPUs in its own foundries. Intel even threatened to abandon manufacturing going forward. Back in July 2025, Intel said it would give up on its next-generation 14A manufacturing process if it couldn’t find a customer, and some speculated that Intel could abandon its own chip fabrication processes. The US government took a stake in Intel a few weeks later, and I’ve always wondered if that dire announcement to shareholders was a negotiation move. Intel signaled that its US-based manufacturing business was struggling and soon after landed the federal government as a shareholder. Now, Intel’s CEO said at CES 2026 that it’s very excited about investing in its 14A process . It’s a huge shift from how the company was acting just last summer. Panther Lake is the first product built on Intel’s 18A manufacturing process, and Intel is no longer depending on TSMC. Intel is also abandoning some of the weirder decisions of Lunar Lake. For example, Panther Lake no longer has on-package memory . In a world where RAM is driving up the price of PCs , that’s valuable. Will Intel’s “Core Ultra Series 3” be watered down, too? While Intel is cleaning up its naming a bit , I’m a little concerned about one thing: does “Core Ultra Series 3” mean anything this time around? A year ago, “Core Ultra Series 2” meant “Lunar Lake”… until Intel released a bunch of Arrow Lake and Meteor Lake chips with Core Ultra Series 2 branding, muddying the brand. Now, at CES 2026, everyone seemed to be using “Core Ultra Series 3” as a stand-in for “Panther Lake.” But will Intel once again release older architectures with Core Ultra Series 3 branding in the coming year? Will we get another round of rebranded Meteor Lake chips? Or Lunar Lake chips? If so, “Core Ultra Series 3” might not mean anything. Either way, Intel’s hardware platform feels like it’s getting where it needs to be. The company is combining performance with battery life, delivering serious integrated graphics power, making its own CPUs, and no longer issuing dire warnings that it may abandon its future manufacturing processes. I look forward to reviewing Panther Lake-powered PCs because they sound impressive. More competition is always good for PC users.
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