Intel Panther Lake Performance Unveiled: Core Ultra Series 3 Roars To Life At CES

As promised, Intel has launched the Core Ultra Series 3 processors at CES 2026. These are the long-awaited "Panther Lake" chips, and if Intel's claims hold up under our own testing, they look incredibly impressive. Intel made some very big promises at the show: 24% improved multi-threaded performance versus its own Arrow Lake processors (despite having fewer P-cores), 50% better power efficiency than AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series, and a whopping 73% better gaming performance against the competition. Let's check out those claims with Intel's slides.

This slide covers the high points of Panther Lake: up to 16 CPU cores in a 4+8+4 configuration, up to 96GB of LPDDR5 or 128GB of DDR5 DIMMs (with LPCAMM support and transfer rates up to 9600 MT/s), next-generation architectures for every single IP block, twelve Xe3 cores in the integrated GPU, and so on. We've ...