Intel’s big launch for CES 2026 is its Core Ultra Series 3 of mobile chips, based on the Panther Lake architecture it announced in October. The new architecture’s biggest upgrade over the Core Ultra 200’s resides in the new Xe3 graphics cores that promise significantly better performance at lower power draw than the Xe2 generation in Lunar Lake, used by some of the Core Ultra 200 variants. And the company briefly mentioned there’ll be a future handheld console platform based on Panther Lake. There are zero details now, but expect some later this year.
Much of the non-graphics aspects of Panther Lake include a lot of optimizations over previous generations, plus a move to Intel’s smaller (2nm) 18A process node, which should result in the relevant chips being better overall, drawing notably less power. The first systems incorporating the 3 Series processors begin shipping immediately.
New naming nomenclature comes with the territory. For one, it’s now known as Series 3 — or maybe I just never called the last-gen Series 2 — and there’s a new “X” in the chip names to denote the incorporation of the Arc Pro B390 graphics, which has the maximum number of Xe3 cores (formerly code-named 12Xe). It has Ultra 9 and Ultra 7 versions, and the latter features the GPU for which benchmark performance was leaked in November.
There’s a Core Ultra 5 chip with Arc B370 graphics, which isn’t denoted by an X. I’m still plowing through the chip lineup to make sense of it, because all the yay!-gaming performance they quote is for that Arc Pro GPU; there’s no indication of how all the other chips will fare. The same goes for Intel’s quote of 27 hours of battery life for streaming video; that’s for an Arc Pro-equipped system as well.
Intel claims significantly higher gaming frame rates, as long as you’re taking advantage of XeSS 3 upscaling and gaming at 1080p. 1080p is fine, but it doesn’t account for connecting to a higher-resolution external monitor, among other things. XeSS 3 will include multi-frame-gen at launch, which uses AI to extrapolate multiple subsequent frames from a single.
Intel took a more modular approach to the GPU tiling arrangement, which gives them more flexibility for scaling performance up and down to hit size, price and power requirements for individual laptop manufacturers.
Intel says preorders for the initial systems start Tuesday.
