Intel’s Panther Lake Chips Aren’t Just Good—They Beat Apple’s M5

Here’s the thing: This is a fairly large laptop. Although I don’t have official specs on it yet, the Lenovo reference device is roughly the same size as the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but the slight wedge shape makes it thicker with the hinge. It’s already about the size of a device that can squeeze a discrete graphics card, and as powerful as the Core Ultra

I like the idea of ​​not needing a dedicated gaming rig to play games, and this device sells that idea better than Lenovo’s reference design. But with gaming laptops becoming more popular and MacBooks becoming more popular in the gaming space, Intel’s success here feels like less of a revelation than I thought. Even the best-in-class X9 chip is still 26 percent behind RTX 4050 performance in a laptop, and that’s the lowest level for a GPU in three years.

Presumably we’ll get thinner laptops that can take advantage of this chip, but we’ll have to see how performance evolves. As of now, the main benefit you get here is not performance, but battery life. Discrete graphics laptops generally have lower battery life, while this larger Lenovo got over 20 hours of local video playback. For the first time, it finally looks like Apple has a competitor within walking distance of its MacBook Pro — at least when it comes to not always having to make a trade-off between performance and battery life.

Why is this so important?

What makes the performance of these chips so important is how they are manufactured. It’s built on the Intel 18A, the latest process node manufactured at the company’s new factory in Arizona. The facility is not just another chip factory. It was hailed as an effort to bring advanced chip manufacturing back to the United States, funded largely by the CHIPS Act. And do not forget the US government’s investment of $8.9 billion in Intel, which acquired 10% of the company’s shares.

The Intel 18A is also a return to form as the previous generation Core Ultra Series 2 was partly manufactured by TSMC. This was a big deal at the time, and an acknowledgment of how far behind Intel was compared to competitors, especially when it came to battery life. While it allowed these chips to be more competitive with Apple and Qualcomm in terms of efficiency and battery life, it was undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow. Notably, they didn’t move the needle in performance from the Core Ultra Series 1 chips.

The Core Ultra Series 3 reflects this trend at Intel, positioning itself well against the likes of Qualcomm and Apple. Based on the number of laptops with the new chips announced at CES, the company has not lost its dominance and remains the primary choice for Windows laptops. In this way, the 18A and Core Ultra Series 3 appear to have been successful so far, at least in terms of offering competitive performance in consumer laptops.